Located slightly left of the middle of your chest, your heart is a four-chambered pump that pumps blood around your body. Your heart, like every other muscle in your body, needs exercise to keep it fit, strong and healthy. Cardio exercise such as walking, jogging and cycling are most often prescribed for heart health although you can keep your heart healthy using weight training.
How Weight Training Can Benefit Heart Health
When you perform weight training exercises, your muscles demand oxygen which is carried in your blood. Your heart must beat faster and more powerfully to deliver oxygenated blood your working muscles. Traditional weight training normally requires you to rest between sets of exercises which gives your heart plenty of time to recover, minimizing the benefits to your heart health. You can increase the demands placed on your heart by arranging your exercises in a particular way.
Pre-exercise Precautions and Considerations
If you are sedentary or you have any medical conditions that could affect your ability to exercise safely you should get a medical check up from a doctor. Make sure you explain what type of exercise you want to do and obtain an “all clear” before commencing your exercise routine.
Upper body/lower body supersets
By alternating upper and lower body exercises, your working muscles will demand large amounts of oxygenated blood which your heart has to pump up and down your body. The movement of blood from upper to lower body muscles and back again places a large demand on your heart resulting in improved heart fitness and health. Suitable pairings include lunges and push ups, dead lifts and bench presses, squats and lat pull downs or leg presses and shoulder presses. You should rest for 60 to 90 seconds after the second exercise in each pairing and repeat each superset 2 to 3 times. Perform 3 to 4 supersets per workout.
Circuit Weight Training
In circuit weight training, abbreviated to CWT, you perform a standard whole body workout but you move more straight through your programme from one exercise to the next without any rest. When you have completed your last exercise, you should take 1 to 2 minutes rest before repeating the entire programme again. Perform 2 to 3 laps of your programme in total.
Peripheral Heart Action Training
Peripheral heart action training, or PHA for short, is similar to circuit weight training in that you take no rest between exercises although PHA is more structured. To design your own PHA workout slot your favourite exercises into this template.
1) Lower body exercise e.g. lunges
2) Upper body pushing exercise e.g. push ups
3) Lower body exercise e.g. squats
4) Upper body pulling exercise e.g. lat pull downs
5) Any cardio exercise e.g. rowing or cycling
You should work through the sequence resting as little as possible between exercises. On completion, rest for a few minutes before repeating for 2 to 3 laps. Adjust the length of the cardio burst and the number of laps you perform to reflect your personal fitness level and vary your choice of exercises regularly to ensure all of your muscles are worked evenly. If you are fit enough, you can design two slightly different PHA workouts and perform 2 to 3 laps of each one during the same session to total 40 to 50 minutes of non-stop exercise.
Caution
Upper body/lower body supersets, circuit weight training and peripheral heart action training are all significantly more challenging that the traditional approach to weight training so you should pace yourself and make progress slowly. Always warm up thoroughly before exercise and cool down afterwards to minimize your risk of injury.
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