What Is Effective Exercise?

Physical exercise includes all activity that enhances or maintains physical fitness and health.

Exercise plays an important role in our physical and mental fitness and contributes to maintaining a healthy bodyweight, muscle strength, joint integrity and mobility, bone density, strengthening the immune system, reducing the levels of cortisol, helping prevent serious diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, insomnia etc.

How does exercise do this?

Challenging or intense muscular exercise is nothing more than a catabolic stressor to the body, catabolic meaning tearing down striated muscle and heart muscle, inflicting microscopic tears and ruptures in it. This catabolic stimulus in turn stimulates the anabolic phase or repair and build-up of muscle. This process can last hours or days..

Aerobic or cardio training challenges the cardio-pulmonary system (heart and lungs) and respiration of the mitochondria at the cellular level. As these systems adapt there is an increase its capacity for work and exercise..

Challenging exercise also affects the nervous system, the pituitary, hypothalamus, and thyroid glands. Many hormonal systems are enhanced through the stimulus of exercise.

Exercise is of course beneficial if done properly.

But exercise can be destructive in varying degrees based on how far we push ourselves beyond our physical limits.

Exercise beyond the degree required to maintain health causes cumulative catabolic stress! (more tissue damage than the body can repair before the next training session)

The body is of course extremely efficient on a biological level and rebuilds and restores itself so that it is a little better than it was before the exercise if…

the proper nutrients are available and enough time between workouts is allowed to make this happen.

So what is effective exercise?

This is the important question.

You see what may be considered effective exercise for those that are in shape trying to stay in shape… may not necessarily work for those that are out of shape trying to get in shape.

I know this is a tongue twister but I want to get you thinking.

Let me explain…..all exercise burns calories as does any activity such as washing the car, cutting the grass, taking a walk, bowling, golfing etc. yet you probably would not consider these activities to be an effective way to lose weight.

These activities are low intensity and undemanding on the musculature of the body. They also are not challenging any of the systems of the body such as the nervous, or endocrine systems.

Now if you are already in shape these undemanding exercises may be enough to keep you there as you are using up all the calories you take in every day, effectively keeping you from gaining any weight.

But if you are overweight and out of shape it is usually the result of a slow, sluggish metabolism and just burning a few calories with these undemanding exercises will not make much difference.

Now this may keep you from adding more weight (fat) which is a plus but will have you frustrated wondering why you are not reaping any more benefits from this type of training.

Most people, and trainers I might add, believe that the calories burned during the workout is the critical criteria to focus on when exercising.

A more effective approach to consider is in the course of burning those calories during the workout you create a metabolic stimulus to the body that stimulates and promotes positive hormonal changes and protein synthesis.

This should be one of the basic principles of an “effective” training system… to promote protein synthesis, not just the calorie burn.

This process of protein synthesis is very, very metabolically expensive requiring thousands of calories to accomplish. This process is how we maintain and build muscle.

What this means is that the most effective and efficient way to achieve your weight loss goals is by building muscle.

Building muscle guarantees a fat burning metabolism.

The typical game plan of riding an exercise bike or walking on the treadmill 30-60 minutes a day along with a few “toning” exercises clipped out of a magazine, probably will not do the job, and if it does, will do so at such a tremendous cost of time and energy that most will eventually give it up, gaining all the weight they lost back and then some.

You are going to learn what high intensity, short duration exercise is and why it is more effective than low intensity, long duration type exercise for general health and fitness!

The focus on low intensity type workouts requires volume training, meaning long drawn out fatiguing workouts, 5-6 days a week to burn enough calories to see any results.

Yes you may see some results with this plan but not near what you get from high intensity short workouts that challenge the endocrine (hormone) system.

Again the best way to drop those extra pounds and keep them off is with a high intensity muscle building exercise program. This type of training will stimulate results with as little as 2 workouts a week greatly increasing the likely hood of sticking with the program.

Now before you get upset and tell me ” but Rick, I don’t want to add muscle I want to lose weight“, let me explain.

I am not talking about the gobs of muscle you see on the covers of Muscle Magazine, but merely 2-4 pounds of muscle.

Let me explain why 4 measly pounds of muscle is so critical to fat loss, muscle that you will hardly notice as it is so dense.

4 pounds of muscle can burn the caloric equivalent of a 2 mile run 365 days a year!

But here is the real story….the calories required to build the muscle in the first place are far more than you can imagine and can effectively draw down the fat reserves.

You see protein anabolism ( the construction of molecules from smaller units) has an almost unbelievably high energy cost.

Amazingly it takes approximately 45,000 calories to build a pound of muscle! Now I don’t want to bore you with the details but the science is there.

Do you see how exciting the prospect of building just 2-4 pounds of muscle can be for someone who wants to lose 20 pounds?

Building muscle guarantees a fat burning metabolism.