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By Andrew Smith, Webmaster at UsanaInHealth.com
In my opinion, exercise is crucial for anyone, regardless of personal goals and targets relating to health. Exercise is not just for athletes or individuals looking to lose weight or gain muscle, it is vital for everyone. If you decide that you do not need to exercise because you look good as you are then it is possible that the inside of your body may tell a different story!
When I suggest physical activity I do not only mean formal exercises in a gym or fitness club setting. I am referring to any activity that gets you moving and pushes your body outside of its usual sedentary or cumfortable state. This is the principle known as OVERLOAD. You overload a muscle when you encourage it to work harder than usual and this also applies to your heart muscle!
I am not about to bore you with all the reasons why you should exercise, but I am confident that you are reading this because you want to improve or maintain your health. Health and vitality begins with your capacity and willingness to use and improve your physical body.
I am confident that there will still be people reading this, thinking that they don’t have time to exercise, or don’t really feel they need to, but this is probably because a part of the brain is attempting to hinder their efforts to improve their health! This is the same part of the brain that tells you that your diet can wait until Monday, or that one more cake wont hurt! We all have coping mechanisms of some sort and look to rationalise decisions we make, even though we know through standard logic that what we are telling ourselves isn’t necessarily the case! The trick is to learn to realise when you are making excuses and to learn to ignore the voice of negativity! This is a hugely important element to making positive changes in any area of your life.
So let me just outline 3 areas to consider for your own personal fitness plan. You must consider your cardiovascular exercise (elevating your heart rate), muscular exercise (strengthening and toning your muscles) and flexibility exercises (improving your posture and range of motion around your joints). Each of these areas are equally important and should be included in your exercise programme.
Cardiovascular Exercise
In this section I will be detailing cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is important for a number of reasons: Firstly, it improves the efficiency of your heart and lungs and enables your body to take in and pump greater amounts of oxygen. If your body is able to uptake and pump more oxygen then you are less likely to get out of breath as quickly. You will be able to continue exercising for longer periods of time and your heart and lungs will generally be healthier. This is known as cardiovascular fitness.
If we overlook the obvious then there are other benefits to working at greater intensities. If we use a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is too easy and 10 is almost impossible then you should try to exercise at a minimum of 7. At 7 it should be hard and you will sweat, but you should be able to sustain the level of difficulty for at least 20 minutes. When you exercise at this level, changes begin to take place in your body. Your body builds more mitochondria in the muscles and the mitochondria are responsible for processing oxygen. To cut a long story short, your body will only burn fat in the presence of oxygen, so the higher your body’s ability to absorb oxygen, the greater your capacity to burn fat!
There is another school of thought that implies you should exercise at a level of 6 out of 10, as this is the ‘fat burning zone’. Let me just explain something: you DO NOT burn more fat working at a difficulty level of 6 out of 10 than you do at an intensity of 7 out of 10! PERIOD! However, if you cannot maintain at least 20 minutes at higher intensity then you should reduce your level of difficulty to achieve the full amount of time. In my opinion this is the only time you should exercise at a lower intensity (other than warm ups and cool downs). Working at 6 out of 10 will NOT encourage your body to adapt and become a fat burning machine!
That said, only work up to greater difficulties as your fitness develops. You should be in this for the long haul, so don’t over do it in the first couple of days! Start with what you are able to do and aim to develop over time. Also, seek support from your physician if you have any health conditions or concerns.
In my next article, I will be outlining a method for managing and improving your cardiovascular exercise and fitness. This will provide a workable guide for any individual who is ready to begin exercising TODAY, or who has been exercising and wishes to improve further.
Please be advised that when you exercise your body consumes more oxygen and as a result more free radicals are produced within your body. Free radicals are volatile molecules, which attack and damage healthy cells in a process called oxidation (or free-radical damage). It is widely believed that we must ensure that we take in optimum quantities of antioxidants (i.e. vitamins) to neutralise free radicals and protect our bodies from degenerative diseases. If you would like to learn more about high quality, pharmaceutical grade nutritional supplements then please visit http://www.usanainhealth.com/products/?page_id=7
About the Author: Andrew Smith is an Independent Associate for Usana Health Sciences and is the webmaster of www.usanainhealth.com. Check out his health blog at www.usanainhealth.com/products and business blog at www.usanainhealth.com/business
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