It is possible to use your pulse rate to determine the intensity of an exercise that you are doing. This is called heart rate training. There are five zones to this that your body will have to learn to work well at.

The first level is considered to be the safest and the easiest one to do. All that is necessary for this level is to walk briskly. This will help to improve muscle mass and strengthen some muscles while it helps to reduce cholesterol, body fat, the risk for degenerative diseases, and blood pressure. It will not make a person stronger or increase their endurance. People who are out of shape, have problems with their heart, or who simply want to protect it without using a lot of energy should stick to this level.

Level two requires you to job slowly. This step is also easy for most people and does not require a great deal of effort. Your body will begin learning to release more fat from its cells to be used as fuel for your muscles. This is why it is often called the fat burning level. Most of the calories that are burned during this level are fat calories.

Zone three is achieved by running easily. It will improve several bodily functions like the lung capacity and respiratory rate. The heart will also get bigger and stronger allowing you to workout longer and harder without becoming as tired as you did previously. You will also burn calories and fat at this zone.

Level four means that you are running faster and harder. This level will increase your heart rate. It will also force your muscles to function anaerobically. This means that they are not getting enough blood or oxygen. It is no ideal or wise to stay in this level for more than an hour at a time.

Level five means that you are running all out. This level is normally used with interval training and can only be sustained for short periods of time. When done too often of for too long of a period of time, it will hurt and you increase the risk of injury.

It is possible for everybody to use heart rate training with very little trouble. There is a level for anyone to be comfortable with and that they can do easily. It is also a good idea to discuss doing this with your doctor before you begin.

Get inside info on the different levels of heart rate training in our guide to all you should know about Heart Rate Training .

categories: heart rate training,cardio exercises,aerobics,weight loss,exercise,workouts

Putting miles on your exercise bike at first can be a lot of fun. Many people love the exercise bike when they first buy it and they will easily spend 30 minutes to an hour doing their exercise daily. However, what happens is this eventually tappers off. Unfortunately hour after hour of exercise bike training and workouts can start to get boring and your body and weight loss or muscle gain can also start to plateau. This leads many to give up on their exercise bike stating it is not very useful or effective. Time and again however, the exercise bike has proven it worth as one of the best ways to get a great cardio workout. So if people know this is one of the best ways how can you beat the boredom and keep yourself on the bike. This article will explore 5 ways to keep your exercise bike workout routine interesting.

Get Caught Up On You Book

That's right after you have been ridding your exercise bike for a month or so you will start to fall in a rut and a set routine. One way to get around this is to change things up. Design a program that has both super hard and fast days for leg muscle building and then slow relaxed cardio days that are longer. On your slow longer workout days that are cardio based it is very easy to spin the miles away while you are reading a book. Get something good from the library that you have wanted to read and get going. There are even special attachments for your exercise bike that can be used to hold your reading materials.

Listen To Your iPod

One of the most amazing things about iPods is people often have a ton of music and maybe even some great informational RSS podcast content that they are dying to listen to. However, finding the time to just sit and listen to your iPod is not a luxury many people have. So why not combine your time on the bike with listening to a great book read aloud to you. If you are more the music type no worries it will still work very well for you. You can practice learning a foreign language, get your latest fantasy football updates or catch up on your favorite podcast. Either way once you put the ear buds in you will be all set to let those miles on the bike just fly by.

What Your Favorite Television Shows

Another thing many like to do and a great way to really distract your mind is to watch a favorite tv show. This can be done from a small portable DVD where you watch old seasons of your favorite shows. Alternatively depending on your space you can set the bike right in front of the TV. This is a great way to get a constant reminder that you should get you workout in regularly. Just do your workout while you watch your most favorite shows.

Go For Interval Training Workouts

Another great way to bust through your plateaus and really increase the effectiveness of your workout is to do some interval training. This might sound like an advanced technique but don't let that freak you out. Interval training is simply increasing your pedal turns to top speed for a minute or less and then slowing it down afterward. By pushing hard for a minute and then resting for 30 seconds to a minute you will really notice the results of your workout.

Try A Circuit Training Day

Another fun idea that many like to do is include their bike workout with some weights in a circuit training routine. Doing things in this way you get the cardiovascular part of your body on the bike. Then you build muscle at the same time by getting off the bike and doing a fast circuit with some weights. You want to mostly focus on upper body here but even some lower body exercises can offer variety and help build lean muscle mass and burn fat.

By mixing things up with your workouts and doing different types of general exercise bike routines you really keep your mind active and the workouts will go by much faster. It is a lot more fun if you have variety and it is way more effective in terms of burning fat and building muscle.

Check out Upright Exercise Bikes for more great routines and bike workouts. Also stop by and look at this great free article on the Benefits Of Upright Exercise Bikes

Stretching exercises should be part of everyone's regular workout routine. One of the great challenges we face in developing a successful habit in taking care of our bodies is the time it takes to do a workout. The beginners workout we offer on our website is designed to work the basic core muscle groups and cardiovascular in a reasonable amount of time for the vast majority of people.

The basic core workout for beginners does include strategies to include the time necessary for stretching. You really must include that as part of your workout.

Most aerobic and strength training programs cause muscles to contract and flex. Often people who train with weights regularly lose their flexibility. They work the muscles without stretching the muscle tissues. Regular stretching is a necessity for overall health and fitness. Stretching exercises will:

Make your everyday chores and jobs easier and less tiring because you flexibility will be improved. Your muscles will not stiffen as quickly or easily.

make your joints less stiff. When your joints are not as stiff you will have better balance, which in turn keeps you mobile and less prone to falls, especially as you age.

improve blood circulation. Improved circulation improves the flow of oxygen and nutrients to your tissues.

relieve stress. Stretching relaxes the tense muscles that often accompany stress. Relaxing the muscles will help you relax your mind.

keep make you less likely to suffer from some muscle related injuries, though that statement isn't without its critics. In our non-scientific study flexibility absolutely helps prevent some injuries that do occur in contact related sports.

Fundamentals Behind Improving Flexibility

Stretching exercises are a physical exercise where skeletal muscles are deliberately stretched to improve the muscle's elasticity and tone. When the muscle is more flexible there is a feeling of increased muscle control and improved range of motion.

Humans and animals naturally want to stretch after a nights sleep or sitting for a long period of time. Many yoga stretches have animal names because they copied the stretch from observing that animal.

A standard part of any athletes routine before and after competition, practice, or a workout is stretching. Increasing flexibility through a stretching program is standard operating procedure.

Many people practice Yoga, which generally involves doing stretching exercises for major muscle groups. Stretching can strengthen muscles as well.

Like any exercise program you do need to use proper stretching techniqe. There several stretching techniques and depending on which muscle group is being worked, some of those methods may be ineffective or damaging. You could possibly cause lasting damage to the tendons, ligaments and muscle fibers.

Stretching Theories

Most of us have no desire, nor a need, to exhibit the grace, strength, and flexibility of dancers, gymnasts, or martial artists, so our stretching routine can be much simpler. If you focus on a few exercises that stretch your core muscle groups such as your legs and back you will become more flexible. It would be important to do those exercises consistently and correctly.

Having a general background knowledge about the soft tissues we are actually stretching will help us better understand proper stretching techniques.

A number of factors affect the elasticity of your muscles.

1. The collagen in the connective tissues change as you age and cause your muscles to lose flexibility.

2. If you have to have your muscle immobilized for a period of time it will lose flexibility.

3. Your muscles can become stiff through over-training.

4. Increase in temperature causes improved flexibility. This can be environmental temperature or internal temperature that comes from the warming of the body due to physical activity. It is no different than a metallurgist who works with hot metal to shape it. Stretching exercises therefore should be performed after your body is completely warmed up.

5. If the cells of your muscles have too much fluid your, muscle can lose its elasticity.

6. Muscles and tendons were designed to protect themselves from being pulled or stretched too far. There are special nerves within the muscle that are sensitive to changes in muscle length and tension. When a muscle is stretched a message is sent to the central nervous system causing a reflex contraction of the muscle. The contraction works in opposition to the stretch helping to prevent over-stretching or pulling the muscle.

7. When you hold a stretch for more than 6 seconds your reacts to the muscle tension by signaling the brain, which responds by signaling the muscle to relax. Therefor when doing stretching exercises you need to do them slowly with a gradual increase in the range of motion every couple of seconds up to about 20 seconds.

An alternative concept that some trainers use is to do stretching exercises that force you to contract the muscle group that works opposite to the one you are stretching. By doing that the muscle you want to stretch is relaxed and you can stretch it more with less tension. For example, to stretch the hamstring you can enlist the use of the quadriceps to force the hamstring to relax while you stretch that muscle.

The primary structure in the connective tissues in and around your muscles is collagen. These tissues are referred to as 'passive' or 'non-contractile'.

Collagen is made up of viscous and elastic properties. A viscous tissue will deform and stay deformed permanently. For example, if you pull on a piece of putty, it will keep that new shape. An elastic tissue (think rubber band) will return to its original length when the force is removed.

Viscoelasticity describes a property of tissues such as collagen, where it will stretch, then stay stretched for a while before slowly returning to its original length. Viscoelasticity tells us a number of practical things about stretching the connective tissues in muscles:

1. Studies indicate that no extra benefit is gained from stretching a muscle several times in a session.

2. Because it only takes 12-18 seconds to reach what is referred to as stress relaxation, there is no benefit to holding a stretch for longer than 20 seconds.

3. Any passive stretching exercises need to be done SLOWLY. Due to the viscous characteristic of the muscle tissue once they are stretched the length changes are not rapidly reversible. The changes are not permanent because the elastic properties of the tissues will eventually bring them back to its original length.

4. Lasting changes in your flexibility come from "reprogramming" the connective tissues. There is some research that indicates the temporary change in muscle length following a stretching routine could actually start to regress after four hours.

How you actually become more flexible

Three physical properties of viscoelastic tissues (creep, load relaxation, and hysteresis) help explain how these tissues elongate with stretching. Creep refers to the ability of a tissue to stretch over time when placed under a constant force.

Load relaxation refers to the fact that not as much force is required to maintain a tissue at a certain length over time.

Hysteresis describes the amount of lengthening a tissue will maintain after a cycle of stretching and relaxing.

Different kinds of stretching techniques

STATIC

The purpose of the held static stretches is to place the joints in the outer limits of their typical range and then subjected to a steady passive stretch. This kind of stretch is perfect for stretching the connective tissue components since it takes advantage of the viscoelastic properties to cause elongation of the tissue and of the six-second rule.

DYNAMIC

1. Dynamic Range of Motion describes stretching when a muscle is taken through a full, slow and large amplitude motion using the opposing muscles to produce the force. Dynamic range of motion stretching is done under control and is smooth by nature.

2. An example of ballistic stretching are leg swings to stretch the hamstrings. They are done very quickly and rapidly. The benefit of this stretching is that it is sport-specific to ballistic athletics and allows integration of the 'stretch reflex' when it is done repeatedly over a period of time. The stretch reflex minimizes its influence to limiting muscle range as the neuromuscular system adapts to this stretching.

3. Bouncing and ballistic stretching are similar. Bouncing is different in that it is performed in small oscillations at the end of the range. The dangers of each are that they often lead to significant muscle soreness because of the rapid stretching of the muscle, which initiates the stretch reflex and increases muscle tension. Furthermore, bouncing fails to provide appropriate time for the muscle tissues to adapt to the stretch.

PNF (PROPRIOCEPTIVE NEUROMUSCULAR FACILITATION)

PNF takes advantage of the notion that muscle relaxation is crucial to stretching of muscle tissue. There are a number of different PNF stretching forms, but the only ones being looked at here are the contract relax (CR), hold-relax (HR) and contract relax and antagonist contraction (CRAC) stretching exercises.

a) The CR method of stretching is when the muscle you are stretching is passively taken to the end of the range of motion. The maximum contraction of the stretched muscle is usually performed against the resistance of another person and held for at least six seconds. The stretched muscle is then relaxed and taken to a new range and held for about 20 seconds. This routine is usually repeated 3-4 times.

b) Hold Relax (HR) is closely related to CR. The difference between the two is HR the contraction type is static. The muscle you want to stretch is passively taken to end of range and then maximum contraction of the muscle is generally performed against the resistance of another person. In this form of contraction, the muscle does not shorten during its isometric contraction. Again, it is held for a minimum of six seconds before relaxing the muscle. It is then taken to a new range and held for about 20 seconds. The exercise can also be repeated 3-4 times.

c) The first part of the CRAC stretch is similar to the CR stretch with the difference being when the stretched muscle is relaxed after its six-second contraction, the OPPOSITE muscle is contracted for a minimum of six seconds. The opposite muscle is then relaxed and the stretched muscle is taken to a new range.

Your workout routine will not be complete without stretching exercises. You will need to work on your flexibility over the course of your life so you can maintain good fitness and remain active as you age.

Get more information on stretching exercises or on workouts.