(Newswire.net — April 24, 2013) Portland, OR — The first thing you need to do is to listen to your body. If you are having a hard time recovering from your workout, then you may be doing too much. If there appear to be no lingering effects from your workout, then you might not be doing enough.
Too little exercise leads to disease!
One of the first things you may notice is constipation. The human body uses physical motion to keep the bowels moving. Constipation can cause colon problems, including leaky gut syndrome and maybe even cancer. In turn leaky gut syndrome can cause food allergies, not something that is fun to deal with.
Improper or lack of exercise can cause muscle imbalance that in turn can cause injury when you try to use those muscles. It also leads to muscle atrophy. If you have ever had an arm or leg in a cast for any length of time you will remember how puny that limb looked when you compared it to the other one. This can set you up for things like back, posture … even joint problems.
Not only does the body suffer, the brain suffers from lack of exercise as well.
It could be as simple as needing exercise to increase the blood flow to the brain, or there may be more to it than that. Nobody is exactly sure what it is, but with the right types of exercise both the thinking capacity and the memory capacity seems to be improved.
Lack of exercise can also cause heart problems. The heart is a muscle, and it needs to be exercised just like any other muscle. Not exercising the heart can lead to atrophy just like any other muscle. The type of exercise that works the heart and lungs is called aerobic exercise. This does not mean you have to join a zumba class in order to be healthy, but it certainly is an option to get your aerobic exercise.
So how much is too much?
In the past the experts said that you should exercise 30 minutes to an hour every day, or at least five days a week in order to maintain your health. The paleo people call this ‘chronic cardio’. In order to get this type of exercise many people jog instead of run because it is the only way that they can last for that long. Some people are never breaking out of a walk in order to maintain any physical motion for an hour at a time.
Is this good or bad?
New research appears to indicate that chronic cardio is bad. It seems that if you pick an activity level that that you can maintain that it teaches your heart and lungs to conserve energy. This in turn teaches you that if you go beyond that exertion that it may be dangerous. Many have heard tales about the avid jogger out for their morning jog and having a heart attack. One theory is that something may cause their heart to suddenly speed up, such as a bird or small animal jumping out of the bushes. Their hearts weren’t used to the accelerated pace while exercising and went into a spasm instead.
What is recommended for exercise?
We all need some muscle building. Muscles burn more calories and take up less space than fat. This makes a person look and feel better. It also helps them maintain that new physic. You also need some cardio, but not long drawn out sessions. New studies show that only ten to twenty minutes of the right type of exercise is enough.
But what is the right type?
High intensity workouts seem to be the best.
There are many names for this concept. Dr. Mercola calls his workouts — ‘Peak 8’. Dr. Sears identifies it as ‘the zone’. Another popular tem is ‘surges’. Many of the older generation simply referred to it as interval training or fartleks. This makes it sound like it can only be used with running, but the concept can be adapted to almost any type of exercise.
If you work out on a treadmill it is easy to incorporate the concept. You start off with a brisk pace, something that you could sustain for a half hour. Depending on your health and activity level this might be just standing there or it could be a light run. One source stated that if just sitting up for half an hour was a strain then that should be your base activity.
After a period of time you will want to increase your activity level to your maximum capability. You should pick a pace that you can only sustain for thirty to sixty seconds. At the end of that time you go back to the base. This could be four minutes of walking followed by one minute of an all-out run, then back to walking. In this way, you can complete a workout in ten minutes. Dr. Mercola does two minutes then thirty seconds and repeats eight times, which is why he calls it peak eights.
You could do the same with almost any type of activity. With cycling it would look like the treadmill. With weights you could alternate between medium and extremely heavy weights. You could also accomplish the same thing with the concept of the time it takes to do reps. Moving the muscles in an extremely controlled, slow manner is tougher than breezing through the movements, this creates the perfect ‘stressor’ that the body is looking for.
The benefit to this concept is that you get more bang for your buck. You create more conditioning of your muscles, especially those of the heart and lungs in a short period of time than what you can accomplish in a longer workout.
In our fast paced lifestyles isn’t that what we are after?
Good health doesn’t take all day, but we do have to work on it constantly. We must always be aware of what we are putting into and taking out of our bodies, and this includes physical exercise.
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