Exercise & Performance Training

Exercise is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. With appropriate variety and intensity of exercise, the body is stimulated in a number of healthy ways. Exercising based on heart rate is a good way to maximize aerobic stresses while minimizing anaerobic over-conditioning syndromes. You can derive your appropriate training heart rate by consulting Dr. Phil Maffetone's book, "In Fitness & In Health, Everyone is an Athlete." His formula gives you a range of cardiovascular stress to stimulate the aerobic physiology of the body while avoiding excessive strain, which would promote a stress reaction on top of the benefits of exercise.

By exercising in the appropriate heart rate range, you maximize the burning of fat as a fuel for muscular activities. Muscles, like engines, consume energy to do work. The energy they consume is determined in part by the intensity of work you are doing. If you are exercising at a lower heart rate where you are easily breathing and taking in the oxygen required to burn stored fats as a muscle fuel, that will be your predominate source of energy. If you are doing higher intensity work, such as sprinting, your body will be forced to turn on an anaerobic energy production system, which would be a conversion to glycogen (carbo) burning for energy. When the body does this, it is due to an inability to get enough oxygen from the lungs to maintain the fat burning process. We have muscle stores of glycogen for short term use, but once those are depleted our body tries to replenish them from blood supplies of glycogen.

This physiological information flies in the face of the historical myth of "no pain, no gain," which has been hawked by countless fitness experts. But the fact is, if you're listening to your body and supplying what it needs in the moment and not overtaxing it, you will gain fitness as well as health. Many people assume that these two terms are synonymous when they are far from it. Fitness is the ability to do physical work, such as running a mile or riding a bicycle. Health is an expression of the overall vitality of the organism, manifesting as an abundant amount of energy to do whatever drives that soul.

Many chronic injuries that I see result from overtraining, where a person simply does not exercise the aerobic system appropriately, and spends most of their time exercising the anaerobic system. This leads to an imbalance in the body and the inability of the adrenal system to cope with these excessive demands. At some point the body will simply fail and the accumulation of stresses will lead to chronic tendonitis, bursitis, or arthritis, or whatever inflammation symptom you can think of. These "itis" symptoms are signs that the adrenal glands have failed through excessive stimulation and they're now fatigued and unable to produce the natural amounts of anti-inflammatory steroid hormones to keep our bodies from being inflamed.

When exercising anaerobically, you can tell you've pushed your body too far at too high of an intensity when you get an incredible sweet tooth after your workout. If you can't wait to get your hands on a candy bar, that's a pretty good sign that you've exceeded your aerobic heart rate range and have been in an anaerobic phase. These principles are important for everyone, whether it's the occasional jogger or an Olympic athlete focused on world-class competition. The physiology remains the same despite the level of perfection attained. If you honor that physiology, you'll be rewarded with the health and fitness gains you deserve.