For all types of exercise, your warm-up activities should: Take each of the joints through full range of motion. Increase body temperature. Get you psychologically tuned to what your body will be doing. Physiological reasons for warming up. Warm-ups help the body and its muscles stretch to perform more effectively by: Slowly increasing muscle temperature. Serving as a dry run, which alerts the individual to potential musculoskeletal reebok and other problems that may occur at higher intensity. Reducing the risk of exercise-related heart problems by increasing coronary blood flow. Improving the elasticity of soft tissues. Preventing early lactic-acid buildup and fatigue. Stimulating motor units of the muscles in preparation for a heavier workload.

To build some muscle while doing your cardio, try circuit-training and body-sculpting classes that roll resistance and aerobic training into one continuous routine. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. None of these types of classes is inherently better or worse than others; it depends on where you’ve been and where you want to go. “If you used to run track or play basketball, you should probably try something like a high-low class, which entails a lot of running and jumping,” she explains. “On the other hand, if you aren’t a dancer or a ‘movement’ person, I wouldn’t recommend a funk or a hip-hop class, at least not initially. It’d be confusing and you probably wouldn’t get a good workout.”

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