Aerobic Exercise
People often think aerobic exercise is the best way to lose weight and get healthy but find the initial results get harder to come by. These are a few reasons why:
- Your body adapts to specific demands placed on your body – once the body has adapted you start to plateau and then go backwards.
- The body sees aerobic exercise as a stress response to a perceived fear and shuts down unnecessary systems for our flight/flight mode. These systems include immune, digestive, hormonal, sleep systems all necessary for optimal health and therefore optimal weight. Simply put, stress actually increases body fat stores.
- Aerobic exercise tends to be either, too long and not intense enough or, too hard and not long enough. Our bodies are designed to work best at the extremes short and very sharp or long and very slow. In weight loss terms, this just means we burn carbs and not fat.
- Aerobic exercise can be very boring especially if the only goal is weight loss. This is very demotivating. which is not achieved for the reasons above
- The repetitive nature on inappropriate machines in inappropriate footwear causes injury.
So the answer (in brief!):
- Vary the stimulus – weight train, power train, assault course train, interval train, play games etc.
- Remember it’s not the work you do that loses weight and gets you fitter it is how well you recover afterwards. Time exercise, nutrition and rest wisely by listening to your body and reacting to it.
- Train at very high intensities for shorts periods (intervals) or long distances at very low intensities. Both burn fat very well.
- Focus on moving lots, having fun and bin the scales. You’ll feel so much better and have much more energy that you won’t even notice the weight dropping off.
- Mix and match your aerobic exercise and run/walk outside in barefoot (or Fivefingers).
You have to get healthy to lose weight not the other way round.
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