The lungs bring oxygen to the blood, and the heart pumps the blood through blood vessels to the muscles . Cardiovascular fitness is the body’s ability to bring oxygen to the muscles for a longer time. The more oxygen you can bring to your muscles , the longer you will be able to exercise without becoming tired. Cardiovascular fitness is also called aerobic fitness.

Perhaps you have done aerobic activities, such as biking or running, that make you breathe faster and harder. You breathe harder because your body is trying to take more oxygen from the air and bring it to your muscles . The more work you do, the more oxygen you need. Regular physical activity makes the heart, lungs, and muscles become stronger and more efficient .


Swimming is a great form of aerobic activity
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Checking Your Pulse

Every time your heart beats , it pushes blood through your blood vessels . You can feel this beating or pulse with your fingertips . The best place to feel your pulse is near your wrist . Place your index and middle fingers at the beginning of your thumb on the inside of your wrist . To find out your heart rate , count your pulse for six seconds and put a zero at the end of the number you counted. For example, if you counted nine pulses (or heartbeats) in six seconds, your heart rate would be 90 beats per minute. Compare your heart rate when you are at rest with your heart rate during or just after aerobic exercise . It should be much faster then.

Checking your pulse
Image: Pia von Lützau, GFDL,
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Improving Your Aerobic Fitness

To keep healthy, everyone should try to be active for 30 minutes at least five days a week. But if you want to improve your aerobic fitness, you need to exercise hard enough to raise your heart rate into the target heart rate zone on at least three of those days. The target heart rate zone is the level at which the heart and lungs become stronger most quickly. When athletes train to perform better in a race , they try to keep their heart rate in the target heart rate zone for as long as possible.

This zone depends on a lot of things like age, weight and sex . Generally, if your pulse is between 125 and 170 beats per minute, your heart rate is in the target heart rate zone . Try to keep your heart rate in that zone for at least 15 minutes. Slowly increase the amount of time you maintain your heart rate in the target heart rate zone until you can do it for 30 minutes each time you exercise .


What Type of Activities Are Best for Aerobic Fitness?

Any activity that makes your heart beat faster and that you enjoy is a good type of aerobic exercise. If you like jumping rope or cycling, that is the activity you should do. You don’t have to do the same thing every day. In fact, two days of basketball, three days of swimming, and two days of bicycling can be more fun than jogging every day.


Jumping rope
Image: JD Lasica from Pleasanton, CA, US, CC BY 2.0,
via Wikimedia Commons