For example you could be super in shape from a muscular perspective but have really bad cardio and vice versa.
How is cardio different from physical shape and what exactly happens in your body that makes you have more cardio?
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Cardio effect all the body at different levels.
You need cardio for your brain to be in good biological health and work properly. It increases chemicals and hormones in you brain such as BDNF, which helps your brain grow connections and work properly. It improves the health of the blood vessels in your brain, it improves brain volume, it helps your brain have better connectivity, etc. The increased blood flow helps clean out the junk from your brain, etc. All of these are linked to brain functionality and stuff like mental health.
Cardio stresses your cardiovascular system, so when you make your hart work hard it causes your heart to become stronger and healthier.
A big thing is around improvement to your mitochondria, basically the energy centres of your cells increase and become better.
Your blood vascular system improves, which means you have better blood flow to your cells, so your cells can get stuff they need better and get rid of stuff they don’t need. Your immune system can better identify and attack bad stuff.
You even have stuff like how exercise is good for your gut michrobiome and vis the short term fatty acids, it improves mental health.
You could go on. Another way to think about it is that your body needs exercise to function properly. So I would gather that almost every biological system, cell and mechanism in your body benefits from physical activity, since they all evolved in organisms that did a decent amount of physical activity.
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