WHY CARDIO GETS EASIER!

CAPILLARIES, THE OXYGEN ROADWAYS OF YOUR BODY

Wouldn’t it be nice to go for a walk, a run, or a bike ride with ease? That the days of laboured breathing and feeling like you’re dying would be over with, and that you would actually enjoy your cardio routine?

The good news about cardio training is, the more you do it (and do it consistently), the easier it gets. Why? You as you consistently do cardio, your body is developing more capillaries. Capillaries are like the roadways in your body. They are tiny blood vessels that transport water, glucose / energy, and oxygen throughout the body.

Compare these two images in your mind: a map of somewhere remote like the Northwest Territories or Alaska, and a map of an urban metropolis like Toronto or New York.

In the remote area there’s not many roads in that big expansive area. The few and far between roads are probably narrow and single lanes each way.

Compare that to the big cities that host a lot of side-streets, avenues, and highways with two to eight lanes of traffic going each direction. These cities are designed to handle a lot of movement with ease.

Think of the sparse, narrow, rural roadways as an untrained body that doesn’t have many capillaries or “oxygen roads.” What happens if you would have the traffic volume of a huge city on the narrow, rural roads? The roads would be backed up, exhausted and things would be maxed-out. The same thing happens when you don’t have many oxygen roads in the body. It is exhausting, frustrating, and breathing is maxed out! In an untrained body with few capillary roads here’s not much opportunity for heavy traffic volumes of blood and oxygen.

Now picture a large city’s roadways as a trained body. It is capable of handling a lot of traffic! When your fit body has a lot of roadways it can handle large amounts of blood pumping volume with ease and it has a greater oxygen supply. The more roadways you build, the more you will be able to handle greater amounts of traffic (or a harder workout) because your body is equipped with lots of roadways or capillaries.

Your body may not be starting out looking like a big city roadmap. At present, your capillary roadways may look more like the boonies. However, as you continue to exercise, construction is being done on your body to build more roadways to handle the traffic of a harder workout.

Studies and research at places like Duke University and the Medical School in Exeter, U.K, have consistently demonstrated that both men and women showed great increases in developing capillary function, density, capillary growth, and the creation of new capillaries after a 3-6 month exercise program.