How to Condition the Heart While Weight Lifting

The heart is inarguably the most important muscle in the body and needs to be in shape to do the important job of pumping oxygen rich blood to the body. While aerobic exercise is best for developing a stronger heart, you can also get additional cardiovascular benefits when weight training. Here's how to give your heart a better workout when you lift weight.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. When done in the conventional manner, weight training is unlikely to significantly condition the heart. Most people leisurely move between machines when weight training, frequently stopping to rest between exercises. Although weight training exercises that use large muscle groups get the heart rate up, the heart rate usually isn’t maintained in the aerobic zone for a long enough period to accrue health benefits. To get real cardiovascular conditioning benefits, the heart rate needs to be elevated to around seventy percent of maximum for twenty minutes or more.

2. The key to conditioning the heart lies in doing a form of weight lifting known as circuit training where you quickly move from resistance exercise to resistance exercise without allowing the heart rate to drop significantly. This allows you to not only build muscle strength and tone, but also to condition the heart and burn more calories at the same time.

3. You can further condition the heart by alternating upper body and lower body resistance exercises. This ensures that you’re constantly using the larger muscle groups in the lower body which gives the heart more of a workout. Moving quickly from exercise to exercise without rest keeps the heart in the aerobic training zone. Circuit training in this manner for twenty to thirty minutes gives a challenging, conditioning workout for all the muscles in the body.

4. An alternative method for conditioning the heart while weight lifting involves doing a short period of cardio after each weight lifting set. For example, you might do three sets of biceps curls, followed by three minutes of jumping rope or a fast run around the track. You would then proceed to the next resistance exercise followed by another three minutes of rope jumping. This process of moving back and forth between weights and cardio would continue for twenty to thirty minutes. This method can burn a significant number of calories and helps to reduce the boredom that comes from doing straight cardiovascular exercise.

Tips & Warnings

• It’s still best to reserve at least two days a week for thirty minutes of straight aerobic exercise, especially if you have a considerable amount of weight to lose.
• Always check with your doctor before starting an exercise program.