What is Healthy Exercise?

Are You Exercising in a Healthy Way?

Ask a hundred people, “Does exercise promote good health?” and almost everybody will tell, “Of course!”  Mostly, they’re right.  Exercise is healthy.  It’s what allows your lymphatic system to move waste products out of your body. 

But some people exercise incorrectly.  They’ll sing the virtues of raising the heart rate, and then they’ll work themselves to death in aerobics classes and gyms.  Instead of promoting endurance, fitness, and health, they end of doing just the opposite. 

What leads them down the wrong path is a belief that the faster and more intensely they exercise, the better.  They never learn the difference between aerobic (fat burning) and anaerobic (sugar burning) exercise, and how one can inadvertently evolve into the other.  In fact, lack of proper information about exercise has helped to foster the largest non-microbial epidemic in the U.S.  It’s called ADS, which stands for aerobic deficiency syndrome.

The Spread of Misinformation

During the 1980’s, fitness maven Covert Bailey promoted an early formula for the ideal heart rate which would, if not exceeded, give you optimal aerobic benefit.  (Aerobic is defined as improving the body’s oxygen consumption.)  The popularized formula he used was 220 minus your age times 65-85 percent, depending on your state of health.

But in the early 1990’s, Bailey discovered that the optimal heartbeat rates he published were too high for almost half the population.  At those rates, bodies burn sugar as a source of fuel, instead of fat.  The revised formula is now 180 minus your age, plus or minus points for good health.  

The problem was, few people paid attention to the revised formula, and consequently, the old numbers are still widely accepted as the standard.  These numbers can lead to unhealth.  Let’s see why this is so. 

Burn Fat or Burn Sugar?

The body has two sources of fuel:  fat and sugar.  Fat is the body’s preferred source, because (1) it doesn’t take away sugar needed for the brain, and (2) because it does not create waste products that remain in the body.  Oxygen is drawn into the body through the lungs and is combined with the carbon in fat.  When you burn fat, the waste products –carbon dioxide and water vapor-are expelled through the lungs.  It is a very efficient, clean burning process.  There are virtually no residue or waste products left behind.

But if you enter into strenuous physical activity such as lifting weights or when you run too long and too hard, your heart and lungs can no longer deliver enough oxygen to the muscles, and the muscles stop burning fat as fuel and start burning sugar.  This switchover takes place because sugar can be turned into fuel without additional oxygen.  Once this happens, your exercise has switched over from being aerobic to being anaerobic. 

Anaerobic exercise gives you energy at a price.  When sugar is burned, it creates lactic acid which must be excreted through your liver and kidneys.  It is a very dirty burning process.  If too much lactic acid is created, the buildup creates stress and leads to cramps, headaches, lethargy and fatigue.

Thus, doing aerobics too intensely or spending too much time in the weight room without sufficient aerobic exercise to balance it can be unhealthy because you’re creating more toxins than your lymphatic system (which moves out waste) can keep up with. 

Develop A Sound Aerobic Base

Here are several things you can do to make sure you don’t suffer from ADS:

1.      Keep yourself aerobically fit. This calls for exercising aerobically at least three times a week for a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes, making sure that you do to overtax your body so that it starts burning sugar and storing fat.  You can determine your ideal aerobic heartbeat using the correct formula of 180 minus your age, plus or minus minor adjustments depending on your health.  The most accurate way to monitor performance is with a heartbeat monitor, the kind you wear on your wrist and that gives you on-the-fly reading.  M-F Athletic Company at 888-556-7464 can give you advice on the make and model that best fits your needs.

 2.   If you work out at a gym, maintain a ratio of three minutes of aerobic exercise (treadmill, bicycle, stair machine, etc.) to one minute of anaerobic exercise (weight lifting).

     

 3.    If you want to know if your workout is truly aerobic, monitor your heartbeat immediately after you stop exercising.  For the exercise to have been aerobic, your heartbeat should drop at least 30 beats per minute in the first 60 seconds after you’ve stopped the workout.

         

       4.   Reduce stress wherever you can, since the body’s fight-or-flight response is totally anaerobic (sugar burning).

          5.     Finally, eat balanced meals that give you the right proportions of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.  Consider taking carnitine supplements if necessary.  Carnitine is a biochemical that is derived from food as well as synthesized by the liver and kidney.  It’s needed to transport fat to the portion of the cell where it is converted into energy.  If you have too little carnitine in your body, you’ll find that even with aerobic exercise, you’ll have a hard time getting rid of those fatty thighs and unwanted middle.  Thus, if you want to lose fat, you want to make sure you’re getting enough carnitine by eating sufficient quantities of cottage cheese, seafood, meats, soy products, lentils, and chick peas.  Carnitine is also available in supplement form.  

Live Smarter and Live Longer

For being such a technologically advance nation, we aren’t very smart when it come to our own health.  Do you know that a recent studies show that the typical person spends his or her last 12 years of life suffering from a severe aerobic deficit because of curtailed physical activity?  This undoubtedly shortens the average life span. 

Aerobic exercise is not a cure-all, but it can often work wonders.  Mental and physical fatigue, depression, low blood sugar, and high cholesterol can be partly or completely remedied by a planned aerobic training program.

Dr. Larry Gertler, M.Ed. D.C., is a nationally known holistic chiropractor and teacher. He is available for in-office visits and telephone consultations (for California residents only). For more information, please call (510) 652-2302 or visit his website at www.drgertler.org.

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