Exercise Workout: Aerobic Exercise

What is aerobic exercise? It’s activity that involves the repetitive use of large muscles to temporarily increase your heart rate and your respiration rate. Aerobic exercise improves your cardiorespiratory endurance, working your heart and lungs to promote cardiovascular fitness. That’s the key to aerobic exercise—cardiovascular fitness. It’s the reason you do it and the reason it keeps you young and vigorous and energetic.
     Cardiovascular fitness is seen by many as the single best measure of changes that occur in the body with aging. Your cardiovascular fitness normally declines by 8 to 10 percent per decade for both men and women after age 25. That means if you’re fifty years old, you could already be 25 percent less fit than you were at twenty-five. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s not that difficult to regain youthful fitness if you’re willing to devote a minimum thirty minutes most days of the week to this end. Indeed, while you may never be as fit as you were at twenty, studies have shown that even people in their eighties have not lost the ability to improve their aerobic fitness level.
    Brisk walking, running, swimming, cycling, aerobic classes, stair climbing, aerobic exercise videos, cross-country skiing, hiking, soccer, rowing, jumping rope, singles tennis, and basketball are all examples of aerobic exercise.
    If you already participate in one of these activities—excellent! You’re looking to a healthier future. If, on the other hand, you’re one of the millions of Americans who don’t get enough exercise, it’s time to change your ways. And, yes, I know you don’t have time. Few of us have time to exercise if we don’t make it a priority.
    We all have too much to do. That’s why you have to be both clever and determined when it comes to aerobic exercise. You have to find one activity you can count on—something you can do easily and fre-quently and that you enjoy. For many of my patients, that’s walking. Almost everyone can walk—outside in good weather, at a mall in bad weather, with a friend or with music or a book on tape.
   Thirty minutes a day most days of the week is the ideal beginning goal for exercisers, but many sedentary people think even that sounds like a lot. If that describes you, here’s what I suggest: ten minutes. Decide that you’re going to do some aerobic activity for ten minutes most days this week. Maybe a brisk walk around the block. Maybe it’s ten minutes of bike riding or a short spell on a rowing machine, stationary bike, or stair climber. Just do it. Look at your watch and go. If you want to continue for longer, great. If ten minutes is all you’re ready for, great. Just do it almost every day this week and for the next couple of weeks.
Before too long you’ll find that you’re ready for more than ten minutes. But don’t rush: It’s better to get those ten brisk minutes in each day, building up a good physical and psychological foundation, than to do an hour one day and then give up because you’re sore or you can’t find that much time the next day. Slow but steady. That’s what will get you to an active, healthy old age.


What’s Aerobic?

How do you know you’re exercising “aerobically”? Patients sometimes get confused about what level of activity is considered to be “aerobic.” The best way to measure this is to check your heart rate, which I’ll describe shortly. It’s not essential to know your heart rate, and if that’s going to discourage you or slow you down, forget about it and just focus on this: You’re exercising aerobically if you’re breathing rapidly but can still carry on a conversation, and you begin to perspire about five to fifteen minutes after beginning the activity, depending on the air temperature.
     Here’s how to gauge your activity level: Your heart responds to changes in your activity levels. When you work harder, it beats faster. Your target heart rate for aerobic exercise is 60 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate. Most of the time when you begin working out your heart rate should be at 60 to 70 percent of your maximum, occasionally going up to 75 or 80 percent. Here’s the standard formula for estimating your maximum heart rate:

Maximum Heart Rate: 220 minus your age in years
Target Heart Rage: 60 to 80 percent of maximum

Remember, aerobic exercise is going to amplify all the good things you do to keep yourself healthy. It will help keep your weight down, it will make you feel optimistic and in control of your life, it will make you strong and flexible and better able to participate in life, and it will reduce your chances of developing many chronic diseases. If you walk briskly just three hours a week— that’s a half hour on six days or even four half-hour sessions and four fifteen-minute sessions—you will:

• Reduce your risk of stroke by 30 percent.
• Reduce your risk of type II diabetes by 30 percent.
• Reduce your risk of heart disease by 40 percent.
• Reduce your risk of osteoporosis.
• Reduce your risk of some types of cancer.
• Boost your immune system

Posted in: Exercise, Health, health tips, Weight Loss