Cardiovascular Endurance: Importance, Tests and Comparison

Sports Exercise Science and Health 1
SPORTS EXERCISE SCIENCE AND HEALTH
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Sports Exercise Science and Health 2
Sports Exercise Science and Health
Ideally, the importance of physical activities that enhances as well as maintains physical
fitness has no doubt gain traction in recent times especially with the emergence of various
lifestyle-related illnesses. Consequently, physical fitness is performed for different reasons, first
to strengthen muscles and the overall cardiovascular system, to hone the athletic skills in a
person, and weight loss or rather maintenance. In this light, continuous physical exercise tends to
boost an individual’s immune system as well as helping prevent the influences of various
diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and the risk of type-2-diabetes (Gröpel, Urner,
Pruessner, and Quirin, 2018). Moreover, physical exercise helps to improve mental health and
promoting a positive self-esteem. This paper, therefore, proposes to discuss in detail
cardiovascular endurance or the aerobic exercise. The paper will achieve this by looking closely
at how different protocols are adapted depending on the population groups particularly test the
endurance of elite athletes and compare the general population and an individual with a health
condition.
Primarily, cardiovascular endurance is considered as the overall ability of a person to be
in a position of performing large-muscle dynamic, moderate-to-high intensity exercises in a
rather prolonged period of time. In this light, this type of exercise ensures that an individual’s
body is exposed to a level at which the heart, lungs, as well as muscles, are working together at
the time of exercise for an extended period (Alvarez, Griffin, and Taft, 2017). Consequently, this
tends to showcase how efficient the body cardiorespiratory systems works and the overall
indicator of the way physical fit and healthy a person is. It is important for a person to
understand his or her cardiovascular endurance since it can signify is one is healthy or instead it
can show that one may need to improve his or her level of fitness. This allows the lung and the

Sports Exercise Science and Health 3
heart to use the oxygen in a better way and thus exercising for longer periods without getting
tired.
Cardiovascular endurance can be tested in many ways during a fitness session. In this
light, there are various types of standardized that have been developed by professionals with an
aim of testing cardiovascular endurance. As a result, there is a need for specialized equipment for
the test to be performed in a proper and accurate manner (Kaur, 2017). Nonetheless, there are
those tests that can be performed with the use of minimal equipment or rather outside the
available resources that often gives an accurate measurement of a person’s cardiovascular
endurance. Some the cardiovascular test endurances include Vo2 Max, Mile run or walk, and
Pacer.
Vo2 Max
In essence, Vo2 Max or rather the maximal consumption of oxygen is considered as the
maximal amount of oxygen that a particular person is in a position to use during exercise. In fact,
this is considered as one of the most valid indexes of aerobic aptness. The measurement of this
index is often expensive and therefore requires as rather trained and skilled personnel to perform
it. This endurance test requires an individual to exercise the exhaustion mostly on a treadmill or
even a cycle ergometer. During the overall session of the test, the consumption of oxygen,
production of carbon dioxide as well as the overall volume of the air is measured using special
equipment (Ng et al., 2018). Notably, this type of cardiovascular test is often useful for those
people who at a risk of getting cardiovascular diseases because it helps a person to lose weight.
The introduction of such test was based on the all-cause mortality as well as the mortality rates
that often stem from various types of cancers.