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The many advantages of aerobic exercise strengthen your heart and lungs and burn body fat!

By: Dr. Andrew Smith

Read More About Exercises

By Andrew Smith, Webmaster at UsanaInHealth.com

In my opinion, exercise is critical for everyone, regardless of personal goals and aspirations relating to health. Exercise is not just for athletes or individuals striving to reduce weight or gain muscle, it is essential for everyone. If you decide that you do not need to exercise because you look healthy as you are then it is possible that the inside of your body tells a different story!

When I recommend physical activity I do not always mean formal exercises in a gym or health club setting. I am referring to any activity that gets you moving and gets you to push your body outside of its usual sedentary or cumfortable state. This is a principle described 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 going to overwhelm you with all the reasons why you should exercise, but I am sure that you are reading this because you want to boost your health. Health and vitality begins with your ability and committment to use and improve your physical body.

I am sure that there will still be people reading this, thinking that they don't have time to exercise, or don't really believe that 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 healthy eating plan can wait until Monday, or that one more cake wont hurt! We all have coping strategies of some sort and look to rationalise choices we make, even though we know through standard logic that what we are saying to ourselves isn't always true! The trick is to learn to acknowledge when you are making excuses and to learn to ignore the voice of negativity! This is a hugely important part of making positive changes in any area of your life.

So I will just describe 3 areas to consider for your own personal exercise regime. You must include 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 routine.

Cardiovascular Exercise

In this article I will be detailing cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is beneficial for a number of reasons: Firstly, it improves the efficiency of your heart and lungs and enables your body to uptake and circulate larger quantities of oxygen. If your body is able to take in and circulate more oxygen then you are less likely to get out of breath so quickly. You will be able to continue exercising for longer periods of time and your heart and lungs will generally be healthier. This is described as cardiovascular fitness.

If we overlook the obvious then there are more advantages to training 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 aim 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 intensity, changes begin to happen in your body. Your body creates more mitochondria in the muscles and the mitochondria are responsible for absorbing oxygen. To cut a long story short, your body will only use fat in the presence of oxygen, so the greater your body's capability to use oxygen, the greater your capacity to burn fat!

There is another school of thought that says you should exercise at a difficulty of 6 out of 10, as this is the fat burning zone'. Let me just clarify something: you DO NOT burn more fat working at a level of 6 out of 10 than you do at an intensity of 7 out of 10! PERIOD! However, if you cannot sustain a minimum of 20 minutes at higher intensity then you should reduce your intensity to achieve the duration. 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 intensities as your health improves. You should be in this for the long haul, so don't over do it in the first few days! Start with what you are capable of doing and aim to develop over time. Also, seek support from your physician if you have any health conditions or concerns.

In my next post, I will be detailing a method for determining and improving your cardiovascular exercise and fitness. This will provide a workable guide for anyone who is ready to begin exercising TODAY, or who has been exercising and wishes to improve further.

Please note that when you exercise your body uses more oxygen and as a byproduct more free radicals are produced within your body. Free radicals are volatile particles, 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 consume sufficient quantities of antioxidants (i.e. vitamins) to neutralise free radicals and protect our bodies against 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

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

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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