Health Alert 270
Dear Subscriber:
Most of what you read about exercise tells you how many hours you need to work out each week to stay fit. Some say 3 ½ hours a week. Others say an hour, 5 times a week. The truth is the hours you spend exercising have little to do with the benefits. The kind of exercise you do and how hard you do determine most of the healthy responses you want from exercise.1
And, contrary to what they suggest, doing any old exercise for hours won’t necessarily help you. In fact, it can hurt you.
Today, I’ll explain why the quality and intensity of the exercise you do is more important than the quantity.
* Cut Exercise in Half and Get Better Results *
To illustrate how conventional medicine confuses this issue consider a recent Harvard School of Public Health study. They report that those who worked out for less than 3 ½ hours per week increased their risk of early death by 55 percent. If you are also obese and sedentary, they increased their risk 142 percent.
This is a sobering study; clearly pointing out that a lack of exercise can have deadly consequences regardless of whether you’re thin or overweight but it doesn’t address how the intensity and duration of exercise affects the benefits. Yet researchers reported this as if they have proven a minimum time needed to exercise per week.2
What happens if you set up a study to address this issue?
Researchers at Laval University in Quebec divided men into two groups: long-duration and short-interval exercisers. They had the long-duration group cycle up to 45 minutes without interruption. The short-interval group cycled in bursts of only 15-90 seconds, while resting in between.3
- Start with a 2-minute warm up at a gentle pace.
- Accelerate to a moderate pace (an intensity of 5 on a 10-point scale) for 1 minute.
- Recover for 1 minute by working at an easy pace (an intensity of 3 on a 10-point scale).
- Repeat this alternating cycle of high-and low-intensity several more times. Gradually increase your intensity during the high-intensity portions of the workout to an intensity of 6, then 7, then 8.
- Throughout the workout, remind yourself to breathe deeply. Focus on powerfully exhaling all of your air. As you inhale, feel your body expanding the oxygen-delivering capacity of your heart and lungs.
If you’re not used to this kind of exercise, you’ll want to start at a slower PACE TM as outlined in chapter 7 of my book The Doctor’s Heart Cure.4
If you don’t yet have the book, you can order it on this website.
Important accomplishments start with planning. Take five minutes at the end of every day to plan your exercises for the next day. Consider your plan a self-coaching tool. Setting a daily goal will help provide direction and continued progress in your exercise.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears MD
1 Exercise Enhan
cement and Risk Precautions; Life Extension Update, Jan. 27, 2005
2 Emery, Gene; Exercise Not Enough to Offset Obesity Health Risks; Reuters, Dec. 22, 2004
3Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, et al. “Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism,” Metabolism