Cardio for The Track

Cardio for The Track...
By Ilya Feynberg (c) - www.RacingFitness.com

Your cardio training is one of most crucial elements of your training…so listen up!

As you’ve already read above (or should have anyway); cardio training will strengthen the muscles that are involved in respiration thus greatly improving your ability to get oxygen into the needed muscles, heart and lungs. This combined with the fact that cardio training increases your ability to expel waste (CO2) and you’ve got a training method that will greatly improve your endurance. Now remember that huge muscles are not needed to drive a car on the limit, not to mention that the added unnecessary weight gain will hamper the cars ability to perform. Instead the goal has and always will be to increase muscles strength to just enough, and then to get your muscles to work to the maximum for an entire race weekend under intense pressures.

There are three main types of cardio exercise techniques that a driver can utilize to his/her advantage. These are:

Cycling/Mountain Biking/Gym bike

Running/Jogging/Walking/Sprinting/Treadmill

Gym Stairmasters/Swimming

Each exercise technique has its own advantages and disadvantages, which are dependent on the driver’s preferences and safety issues. For example:

Cycling is great way to gain more endurance and can be fun to do as well. But it can have its drawbacks; bikes can get expensive (but you don’t need an expensive bike), it can also get boring and mundane when your constantly riding alone in the same cycling venues.

With mountain biking, boredom is not a problem that you’ll have to worry about, as a good deal of adrenaline is involved. While mountain biking is great for building endurance, muscles and conditioning, it too has its drawbacks. The bikes like cycling can get expensive, and injury is something of a bigger risk when mountain biking then when simply cycling, after all your almost never on level asphalt. One point that I do want to make on equipment costs is that you do not need a top of the line cycle or mountain bike to perform your these exercises. While $5,000 bikes are wonderful, they’re simply not a requirement. I started out with a $280 mountain bike that I used and enjoyed for almost 2 years.

The gym bike is always easy to get to and use and with a gym membership, very cheap in comparison. Using the gym bike also holds a very slim chance of injury; you’d have to perform the exercise totally wrong for this to happen. However the gym bike is probably the most boring exercise method known to man kind, and as a result your motivation to constantly hop on and do your cardio for the day might diminish rather quickly. However, if you’re more disciplined and focused then average and enjoy the bike…well…by all means.

Running, jogging and sprinting are all a great ways of getting your cardio exercises, but too have their drawbacks. Running puts a decent amount of strain on the muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones of the body and can lead to injury or overtraining quickly enough if not balanced out with other exercise techniques. However these exercises are the cheapest to perform and have the highest cost to effectiveness ratio, just make sure you set your cardio training up just right to avoid overtraining and injury.

While swimming is nothing new to cardio training, the use of the Stair Master or Stair Climbing machine is a rather new trend that’s catching on rather quickly. While the Stair Master Machines can be found in just about any decent gym (in the cardio room/section) they too have they’re benefits and drawbacks. The Stair Master is a great tool for your cardio workouts and will definitely help get you into great cardiovascular shape, not to mention a good workout for your legs and calves. Even this exercise technique has its drawbacks however. For instance, the Stair Master should not be the only cardio exercise that makes up your cardio routine, since it can cause excessive knee and joint wear overtime. Also, gym cardio machines like the stair master, treadmill, gym bike etc… while great exercise tools can be a boring and tedious way of going about your cardio training.

Swimming is a fantastic exercise for building up your cardiovascular endurance and unlike other exercises has fewer and more simple drawbacks and is also a rather inexpensive exercise to perform. Swimming is easy on the muscles and joints and the only real drawbacks are going to be a lack of variety in your routine, and some safety issues (which we will go into in the swimming portion). Swimming also will not work the legs and calves as extensively as other cardio exercises will.

Let’s take a more in depth and detailed look into the different variations of cardio training…

photo by maHidoodi