Simple cardio videos for Disabled people

What is Cardio?

Cardio exercises are often the simplest, and most diverse form of exercise. Basically, think of cardio as any exercise that challenges the heart and lungs enough to improve their function.

By challenging and strengthening your cardiovascular system, you increase its capacity to take in oxygen, pump blood to the working muscles, and clear carbon dioxide and other waste products from your system. Plus, as your heart becomes more efficient at pumping blood, your resting heart rate slows, reducing the stress on your most vital muscle.

Long story short: cardio training helps your heart and lungs function better both during exercise and at rest.

Please make sure that when you do these activities at home, you give yourself plenty of room to move around and that you drink plenty of water before, during and after exercising.

5 Videos to try

• HIIT workouts by British Blind Sport

British Blind Sport (BBS) have a variety of videos available with different exercises, including some high-intensity workouts to get your blood pumping and sweat out the frustrations of the day. The videos cover a variety of disciplines and from a range of instructors, to ensure that you can stay fit and healthy from the comfort of your own home.

• Aerobic exercises by WheelyGoodFitness

Wheely Good Fitness hosted a number of wheelchair-focused videos during this period of lockdown on the Wheely Good Fitness YouTube channel, including great aerobic sessions!

This video is an aerobic workout. Suitable for standing and seated participants, this energetic workout requires no equipment and finishes with a few minutes of stretching.

• Seated Cardio and Strength with Ben

We were joined by Ben Clark from Adapt to Perform for this series of Active at Home videos. In this video Ben will take you through some seated cardio and strength exercises you can do from the comfort of your own home.

• #MovewithMencap

Mencap have some short YouTube videos available which show you some exercises you can do at home. This includes a variety of exercises including twists, jumps and marching!

• BSL exercise videos from Living Options Devon

Living Options Devon (LOD) has a variety of videos, with BSL and subtitles, available on their YouTube channel. The videos contain a number of energetic exercises to increase your heart rate

Whatever you are looking for, there is a Guide for you, and you can search through Yoga, Dance, Cardio, Strength and Seated in the guides section of our website. Just select Active at Home on the filters at the top of the page.

We want these pages to always work for you, and for that, we need help. If there’s a resource you’d like to see more of – or you have a video of your own you think would interest others in the community, please reach out to the team and email @GYAInfo@disabilityrightsuk.org.

How you exercise and what you enjoy is always evolving, and we want our page to too!