hello and welcome to the English like a native podcast my name is Anna and today you're going to hear lots of off-the-cuff vocabulary
as I talk to you very freely about cardio doing cardio now our focus for this week is the gym in general but cardio is something that you can do outside of the gym as well and many people do.
So cardio, C-A-R-D-I-O, cardio is short for cardiovascular exercise.
Exercise that brings your heart rate up and makes you pant or breathe quite rapidly or heavily depending on how much you exert yourself.
So cardio is not my favorite form of exercise when I go to the gym.
There are many machines that can help you to do cardiovascular exercise.
We have the treadmill which you run on or walk on.
I'm a little bit unusual but I'll tell you about my treadmill exercise in a moment.
There's also the exercise bike.
And if you go and do a class where everyone is on an exercise bike that's usually referred to as a spin class or a spinning class where everyone exercises on a bike and you're led by a PT which is short for personal trainer.
Usually there's a PT taking the class and making everyone cycle really hard so they get their heart rates up.
you also have the rowing machine and the cross trainer which is where your arms are pulling at the same time
as your legs walking it's quite an unusual piece of equipment or sometimes I think it's referred to as an elliptical but for me it's simply a cross trainer nice and simple and we also have the step machine which is like a rolling staircase where you're just stepping up going up and up and up covering 20 floors in one short space of time.
I like the step machine but it does hurt my knees so I don't do that very often.
What I do in the gym
if I'm doing some cardio or generally just as a warm-up is I will go onto the treadmill but I don't tend to run I increase the incline of the treadmill which means I raise it up at the front so I press a button to increase the incline so that it's as
if I'm walking uphill so I increase the incline to be quite steep and then I turn around and I walk uphill backwards people look at me like i'm very odd
as if i don't know how to use a treadmill the reason i do this is
because it's supposed to be very good for bad knees so i have quite inflamed knees probably because of my squash playing And so I do backwards walking on the treadmill with an incline in order to improve my knee strength and recovery.
Now it's important when you are using the cardio machines to pace yourself and that's the first item of vocabulary that I have on my list for you today to pace.