Two weeks down already! Week 3 focuses on your aerobic fitness aka cardio and heart health
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What is aerobic fitness?
In short, aerobic fitness is cardio (or your endurance). The term "aerobic" refers to the oxygen in your body; so aerobic fitness refers to how efficiently your body uses the oxygen being delivered from your lungs, through your heart, to each muscle, then back to your lungs. 

Why is aerobic fitness important?
Having a higher aerobic fitness not only allows you to do more, for longer, it does so by requiring less work from your heart. By maintaining a high level of aerobic fitness, you can improve your quality of life in essentially every aspect. Healthline has a great article breaking down 13 Benefits of Aerobic Exercise including better sleep, regulating blood sugar, and strengthening your immune system. 

How to improve aerobic fitness?
High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) can maximize the benefits you will see from regular cardiovascular exercise such as long distance running, cycling, or swimming. HIIT consists of short bursts of exercise followed by short rest periods, for example, 40 seconds of sprints followed by 20 seconds of walking - repeated for 10-30 minutes depending on your fitness level. This style of training works well alone, but to see the biggest jump in your endurance, you should use it in combination with regular endurance training so try alternating between long cardio workouts and HIIT. 

This is training your vagus nerve, which tells your heart to speed up/slow down which means that after exercise, your heart will return to resting faster. Your heart also will be learning to pump a higher volume of blood with each beat to deliver more oxygen to your muscles (rather than having to pump so many times).

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