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 health is the health of your heart muscle. If it’s healthy and strong it can circulate your blood more effectively and blood is an extremely important part of your body. You train it by doing aerobic exercise that increases your pulse into a target zone and keeps it there – sort of like doing reps with weights. The “swimmer’s body” is perhaps the best example of what you have with good cardio but not a great deal of strength versus something like the “powerlifter body” if strength is your whole build.
Cardio also, crucially, improves the distribution of fat around your body and so regular non-athletic type people will seem slimmer if they have good cardio because their fat doesn’t just sit around their bellies where it was the easiest for their body to accumulate it.
This question for whatever reason really reminded me of Aziz Shavershian who was a hero to incels because he lost a ton of weight through simple starvation and discovered he had naturally exquisite musculature and went on to do some modeling then died in a sauna because he had never even tried to build up his cardio at all.
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