Cardiac Rehab Workout - who needs to exercise after this?

Last Wednesday I got the pleasure of spending time with one of the cardiac rehab nurses, who not only taught me about the diversity in this particular field, but also let me participate with the patients at their weekly workout at the hospital gym.

Cardiac rehabilitaion is offered to a specifc group that involves, people who have cardiac history. This includes MI's, heart failure, post angioplasty, post CABG, post TAVI, post ICD and stable angina, I know there're lot of fancy abbreviations, but if I were to spell 'em out for you, you wouldn't learn anything and besides, google exists for this very purpose!
There are workouts four times a week, split into two categories. There's exercise with moderate intensity twice a week, this is for the "better" patients, they might be slightly younger that you'd expect for people with cardiac history - these are more or so fit enough to endure one hour of moderate intensity exercise. Then there's the low intensity exercise group, which is also twice a week, and the average age in this group would be around 75-80. This was on of the groups that I got the pleasure of participating in.

So I show up for my appointment with the nurse, dressed in scrubs, because I simply couldn't be bothered with putting on actual and comfortable workout clothes. The room is near the physio department, and it's basically one big gym room with everything apart from a treadmill. There are only two ladies in this class, the rest are male. Each of them get a belt that monitors and records their heart rates, and they get their BP's done prior to the exercises. They all have a target heart rate, that they should try to aim for, while they exercise. 
They have a card attached to their clothes that tells them which exercises, they are to do and in what order to do them in. The music is put on and the whistle goes of - now you have two minutes to do whatever is written on your card, then the whistle will sound and then you move on to the next exercise for two minutes, and so forth. I also got a card of my own, my card was identic to one of the other participants, who was this 80 year old gentleman, with whom I bonded with instantly. We would actually compete against each other or so he would say, especially when we did the walking exercise. He'd also refuse to start the exercises until he'd heard the whistle, to preserve his strenght he said, but we both knew better.
So there I was, doing cardiac rehab workout and actually having so much fun, being the semi-old age of 22, I actually broke out a sweat, this was obviously because I was chatting with my old chap and not because I'm slightly out of shape! ;)

-xoxo-