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When you focus on cardio exercises for the upper body, it’ll help you improve your strength. It’s important to focus on improving upper body strength, as that helps with balance, stability and flexibility.
The stronger your upper body is, you’ll be able to provide support to your lower body as well in exercises such as hack squats or barbell squats, where the upper body supports the weight, while the lower body takes on the resistance.
Best Cardio Exercises for Upper Body
Here are seven exercises you should focus on to improve upper body strength:
1) Push-up and Burpees
Push-ups and burpees are body weight exercises. That means you can do them whenever you want to without any equipment or weights. Additionally, body weight exercises build the foundation of your body and muscles needed to move on to advanced variations involving weights.
2) Devil’s Press
This is one of the best cardio exercises to build upper and lower body strength. While it requires dumbbells, you can start by using light weights.
Due to the entire movement, the exercise requires you to use your lower body and upper body quite a lot. The various muscle groups that work during this movement are shoulders, chest, lower back and quads.
3) Rowing
Interestingly, you can do this cardio exercises inside the gym and outside as well. However, at the gym you’ll need access to a rowing machine, or you’ll have to go rowing.
As rowing requires additional effort, and the upper body is a part of the overall motion, this exercise not only helps in burning calories but also improves upper body strength.
4) Swimming
There is no doubt swimming is one of the best cardio exercises to build upper body strength.
Not only is it heavy on the upper body, but it's a water activity as well. Water adds an additional level of resistance, which means the body needs to burn additional calories to provide the extra energy required for swimming.
5) Boxing Bag
If you’re focused on building upper body strength and have access to a boxing bag, you should use it.
Boxing requires an immense amount of movement. Moreover, it’s a constant resistance exercise due to the punching involved. These punches require significant energy and force the muscles to grow thicker and stronger to withstand the additional resistance.
6) Upper Body Circuit Training
Circuit training is a great way to improve strength. It's considered one of the best cardio exercises, as it focuses on burning calories to provide the additional energy needed to complete the exercises. Moreover, circuit training can revolve around body weight exercises for the upper body.
7) Battle Rope HIIT session
If you have access to a battle rope, make sure you use it. Battle ropes are an excellent form of cardio because of the way they increase your heart rate and metabolism. If you do it as a HIIT session, it’ll serve as quite the exercise to burn calories.
Battle rope, meanwhile, requires you to constantly use your arms and keep your core engaged. That prompts the muscles in question to become stronger for progressive overload in the future.
