Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Aerobic Exercise for Health optimization and fat loss

Here is a guide for the physical activity portion of your health optimization program.

As you already understand the first component to good health/weight loss is a proper diet. Next in line is Exercise.

Everyone knows that you need to exercise to achieve weight loss and for health maintenance, but what exercises, how to do it and how frequent? We will cover these areas in an easy to follow guide.

There are 2 major components to exercise: Aerobic, Anaerobic.

Aerobic Exercise promotes fat loss, endurance and cardiovascular benefits depending on how it is performed. There is no better way of losing fat than performing Aerobic exercise at the fat burning zone. How’s do you do this?

First and foremost, lets determine your fat burning heart rate:
(220-age) x 75%

As you perform aerobic activities maintain a heart rate at the fat burning rate +/- 10bpm throughout. You can do this easily if you have a heart rate monitor that is commonly attached to exercise machines or get a heart rate monitor for outdoor activities. Alternatively you could count your pulse rate for 15 seconds and multiply it by 4 every once in a while while exercising. At the fat burning rate, your body will rapidly use up the freely available blood glucose and glycogen stores and start burning fat for energy. Exercising at a heart rate greater than the fat burning zone will result in the body burning protein (muscle) for energy and this is detrimental.

Aerobic Exercises include walking, jogging, cycling, swimming and any other physical activity that increases and maintains heart rate at the fat burning zone. Therefore washing or polishing your car, mopping the floor and climbing up the stairs could be considered aerobic exercises.

You should perform 30 to 45 mins of aerobic exercise at your target heart rate 3 times a week (e.g., Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Alternate aerobic exercises with strength/resistance training on the other days of the week. Finally leave 1 day for your body to relax and recharge.