By Nicole DePalma, MS, LMT

I am taking a little liberty here, as there are actually four physical fitness components, but I have come to discover that a component that I will be adding on to this list is almost the most important component in long-term fitness and wellness success. I will break each component down into its own installment, so over the next four weeks, we will discuss a new topic.. .bet you can hardly wait for your next issue to appear!

To kick off this fitness series, I would like to start with cardiovascular (CV) fitness. This component makes up your heart, or cardio, and vascular systems, or the arteries and veins. Basically, the CV system is a pump, your heart, and an internal looped system of vessels that take oxygenated blood from your heart out to the body (the arteries), and vessels that return the “used” blood back to the heart (the veins) to be re-oxygenated by the lungs, and the whole loop starts all over again. What we try to achieve in CV training is to strengthen your heart so it can pump blood throughout the vascular system more efficiently. The heart is a muscle, and just like we strengthen other muscles of the body, we strengthen the heart so it can keep up its good work over a long lifetime.

To get our “tickers” in shape, we need to add some intensity to our activities enough to raise our heart rate, or how many times our heart beats per minute, which in turn will improve many other things like stroke volume (SV), or how much blood the heart pumps out in a beat, or our good old blood pressure (BP). The lower the BP number (within a normal range, of course), the better off we are. A healthy heart creates many other healthy things for us, but how do we know where our heart rate (HR) should be? What is too high or too low a HR to improve our overall physical fitness?

There are many HR formulas out there, some of them a “ball park” range of heart beats per minute (BPM), and some are very precise. Unless you are a mathematician, or enjoy working through formulas, there is another way to gauge your HR, and it is a pretty good predictor of where you may be on the “get your heart healthy” rater board. I am talking about the rate of perceived exertion (RPE), or, my favorite way of looking at this is, if you think you are honestly working pretty hard, you may very well be, and conversely, if you think you could kick your workout up a notch or two, you probably could. There are scales of RPE, say 1-20, but we will use a scale of 1-10 to get a sense of how RPE works. Say that one on this scale is you and me sitting around just chatting, and ten on this scale is a near-death experience where you have visions of God wearing a sweatsuit, and Heaven resembles a gym.. .we are not going to go there, but unfortunately, sitting and chatting really will not be an option, either! On an RPE scale of 1-10, we would really like to feel as if we are a “four” to perhaps a “seven” or “eight”. Signs and symptoms of these numbers are elevated breathing, where you can still talk, but would prefer to spend more time breathing than talking, the face gets a little pink to “a healthy glow”, and some sweat starts to appear.

So, we have just gotten the most complicated component of CV training out of the way, or the intensity of our workout.. .good on us!

Now, we move on to the next component of CV training; duration of the workout. Duration means how long you workout at one time. Is that 10, or 15 minutes or a half-hour? The duration of your workout, and all the other components of CV training, will depend on where you are right now. What kind of shape are you presently in? What is your fitness goal? Are you wanting to condition for a new sport? Are you wanting to recover from surgery or an illness? Are you looking to build a fitness program for the long haul, or a lifetime regime? These are some things to consider while you build your CV training program.

The third component of CV training is frequency, or how often you workout. If you are “hit or miss” with workouts, you may feel more like a “weekend warrior” than someone who is making gradual but steady improvement in your training. A question to ask yourself here would be what can you consistently maintain? Can you know for sure that you could workout twice a week, or four times a week, or even to get up from your office chair and walk around every hour? Consistency is the key with any type of fitness training, and honesty with yourself is another key. If you set yourself up with a “high bar” of working out, you may only be setting yourself up for failure. Commit to a frequency of working out that you can maintain even if bumps in your schedule happen from time to time.

Now, the last component of CV training is mode. Mode means what activity you engage in during your workout. Do you take fitness classes? Do you jog or run or walk? Do you dance? Do you play a sport? Are you an active gardener? These activities are examples of mode. As you can see from the picture that accompanies this article, my favorite mode of CV training is horseback riding with my horse, Jazz!

To recap, the four components of CV training are: 1. intensity, 2. frequency, 3. duration, and 4. mode. It is always suggested that you have a Health Care Provider’s approval to begin a workout program, especially if you have health issues that need to be taken into consideration. Our next installment will discuss musculoskeletal training. I know, I know…”be still my beating heart!” Until then, cheers!-