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

By Andrew Smith, Webmaster at UsanaInHealth.com

In my opinion, exercise is vital for everyone, regardless of personal goals and targets relating to health. Exercise is not just for sports people or individuals striving to reduce weight or gain muscle, it is crucial for all of us. 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 only mean formal exercises in a gym or health club setting. I refer to any activity that gets you moving and gets you to push your body outside of its usual sedentary or relaxed state. This is the principle described as OVERLOAD. You overload a muscle when you encourage it to work harder than it normally would and this also applies to your heart muscle!

I am not going to bore you with all the theory behind why you should exercise, but I am sure that you are reading this because you want to enhance your health. Health and vitality starts with your capacity and willingness to use and improve your physical body.

I am sure that there will still be individuals reviewing this, believing that they don't have time to exercise, or don't really believe that they need to, but this may be because a part of the brain is attempting to hinder their efforts to improve themselves! 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 justify choices we make, even though we know through basic logic that what we are telling ourselves isn't necessarily the case! The trick is to learn to acknowledge when you are making excuses and to learn to drown out the voice of negativity! This is a hugely important part of making positive changes in any area of your life.

So I will just outline 3 areas to incorporate into your own personal exercise regime. 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 focusing on cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is necessary for a number of reasons: Firstly, it improves the efficiency of your heart and lungs and enables your body to uptake and circulate greater quantities of oxygen. If your body is able to absorb and pump more oxygen then you are less likely to get out of breath so quickly. You will be able to continue physical activity for longer durations and your heart and lungs will generally be healthier. This is described as cardiovascular fitness.

If we overlook the obvious then there are additional benefits to exercising 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 will be hard and you should sweat, but you should be able to maintain the intensity for at least 20 minutes. When you exercise at this level, changes begin to take place 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 burn fat in the presence of oxygen, so the greater your body's capability to process oxygen, the greater your capacity to burn fat!

There is another school of thought that suggests you should exercise at a difficulty of 6 out of 10, as this is the 'fat burning zone'. Let me just explain this: 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 maintain a minimum of 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 undergo change and become a fat burning machine!

That said, only work up to higher intensities as your health improves. 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 guidance from your doctor if you have any health conditions or concerns.

In my next article, I will be detailing an approach for determining 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 develop further.

Please note that when you exercise your body consumes more oxygen and as a byproduct 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 need to ensure that we consume optimum quantities of antioxidants (i.e. vitamins) to eliminate free radicals and safeguard 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

Note from Author: Higher intensity physical activity increases oxygen consumption and hence, free radical activity. Antioxidants are essential for eliminating free radicals in the body. Usana manufacture world-leading nutritional products including Usana vitamins and multimineral products. Visit our Usana Products website for more information.