Dear Health Conscious Reader,
My patient Terri L. is bubbling with energy.
When she comes into the office now she has a big smile on her face, she greets my whole staff and has so much to say. She’s shed 80 pounds so far, and she was in the office just yesterday telling my staff happily, “… and everything that’s left is all muscle!”
Terri seems completely unrelated to the person I met when she first came to me as a patient. She was lethargic, walked slow and talked slow. She had her head down all the time, spoke in a monotone and had hardly any animation.
Now she’s very energetic, and everyone notices the difference.
Why?
I think it has to do with the fact that she’s doing PACE.
When I first tell people about PACE, they almost always go away thinking it’s about high-intensity exercise or interval training. It’s not. It’s about increasing the intensity of your exertion little by little to build up your aerobic capacity, and then accelerating the time you take to get to that higher intensity.
That’s why I called it Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion.
Acceleration forces your body to store energy in the muscle. Because when you accelerate the challenge, your body will notice that it needs to get the energy faster. And it will get to work at having the energy instantaneously available.
The slow burn of aerobics – having to exercise over a long period of time – makes you feel lethargic. With PACE, you get energy fast, and you feel energetic all the time.
That doesn’t mean you have to be able to sprint 100 yards right away to do PACE. In fact, Terri started with walking. She dropped 45 pounds in four months. The point is to work out at a level that is challenging your current metabolic capacity.
When you’re deconditioned from the modern world, you have to gradually gear up. It’s going to take a little while for your heart rate to get up. Your body doesn’t have any of the instant energy called reserve capacity on hand, so you have to practice.
With my own body, I learned that initially, I’d have to jog for 200 yards, walk back, jog for 200 yards … and then the next workout I could go a little bit faster.
But as I became conditioned for higher intensity, I learned that I didn’t need as much of a warm-up to get there. So then I started to condition that process of gearing up, too.
After a while, I would come out and be at 90% of my peak intensity from the beginning with very little warm-up. And I only needed to rest for 20 seconds before I could go again, instead of the 4 minutes I used to have to rest between sets.
By incrementally increasing the challenge, I built my reserve capacity And by pushing myself to recover faster, I accelerated the challenge. Now I have access to all my reserve capacity on demand.
One of the things we discovered by accident with patients at my clinic was that acceleration is so beneficial to you because it gives you energy you can feel.
You’ll jump out of bed with more energy than you’ve ever had. You’ll have a sense of real hope, and victory. You’ll smile more. All because your high energy output system is on tap.
With PACE, you can choose any form of movement or training you like. It can be body weight training or something like what Terri chose: 45 seconds of walking at a time. The key is to start where you’re comfortable and build from there.
Try it for yourself. Here’s a great PACE workout I use to help me build my aerobic capacity, and get access to all that energy right away, at any time:
First, find a hill or incline near you. It might be in a park, on a trail or even at a hilly golf course. If you can’t find a hill, try the beach. The sand can be just as challenging as a hill.
- Measure your standing heart rate so you have a baseline or “normal” measurement.
- Start up the hill at whatever speed is comfortable for you. It may be simply walking. I sprint halfway up the hill at a park near my house, then turn around and sprint backwards to the top. Keep it fun and make it what you want.
- Measure your heart rate when you get to the top. You can use your trip back down the hill to recover.
- The next time you go up the hill, give yourself more of a challenge. If you walked the first time, “power walk” the next time. Use your arms to help and get your whole body involved. If you sprinted the first time, try doing standing broad jumps all the way up.
- Take your heart rate again, and then rest.
- You should be panting at the end of each time up the hill, but you should not be exhausted throughout the workout. If you feel light-headed or dizzy, stop and relax. Respect your limits.
- On your third time up the hill, try jogging. If you can’t jog, try walking just a little faster.
Whatever you do, remember that for it to be a true PACE workout, it should take more effort for each set.
As you become more conditioned, you should notice your heart rate returning to normal faster after each set of exertion. You want to push yourself in this area, too, and shorten your rest periods. As you gradually accelerate how fast you can get to peak exertion, your body will respond by giving you energy you can feel.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
PS: Just a note to let you know P.A.C.E. Fitness By Avis – the first P.A.C.E. fitness center – is holding its grand opening celebration in suburban West Palm Beach next Thursday, July 21, from 6-9 p.m. I’ll be there and hope you can stop by if you’re in town. It’s located in the Barclay Square Shopping Plaza, 2960 Jog Road in Greenacres, Fla.