Exercise is Crucial!

In my book, “Why Health Insurance Does Not Ensure Health”, there is a lengthy chapter on the critical need for exercise.  A summary of the specifics of what you need to do are outlined here:

FREQUENCY:  Plan to exercise every day.  The goal is to exercise six or seven days per week. There will be days, often unanticipated, in which something comes up and you just do not have a chance to exercise.  Do not plan a day off; rather let it occur naturally. You need to schedule your exercise time into your daily schedule.  Do not leave it unplanned with the thought of fitting it in.  It will not work.  Exercise has to be as important to you as your other activities, both work and leisure.

DURATION: You need to do a minimum of 30 minutes, NON-STOP, aerobic exercise at a pace that makes you “comfortably” short of breath. The 30-minute non-stop requirement is critical to achieving what is called the “training effect”. It relates to the blood pressure and cardio-protective aspects of exercise. Two 15 minute periods do not make 30 minutes NON-STOP!

If you stop and think about it, when you exercise, you are not training your heart.  Your heart exercises all the time.  In fact, you exercise to reduce the amount of work your heart does.  Your heart beats all the time.  It beats slower when you rest or sleep and faster when you exercise.  The fitter you are, the slower it beats – not just with exercise, but at rest as well.  Are you aware that fit individuals have very slow resting heart rates?  Marathoners and fit tennis players run resting heart rates in the 30s and 40s.  They develop those slowed rates by intense aerobic training, virtually always by running.  Playing tennis is a stop and go sport.  Running, jogging, and walking are aerobic activities. A sustained aerobic activity (age and health appropriate), is what you want to do.

When you engage in sustained aerobic exercise (30+ minutes non-stop), you are training the arm and leg muscles to be more efficient. You might think of it as your muscles getting better gas mileage. The fuel your muscles use is oxygen which is carried in your blood.  Your heart is pumping that blood to your muscles. If you make those muscles more fuel efficient, they will need less oxygen-containing blood to nourish them and thus the heart will not have to work as hard pumping that blood to them. This efficiency is called the training effect.  It reduces the workload on the heart both at rest and at exercise.  It takes sustained aerobic exercise to achieve it and thus the 30 minutes non-stop exercise prescription.    The training effect reduces both resting heart rate and resting blood pressure which also reduces the body’s oxygen needs at rest and exercise. This is one of the ways that fitness reduces the work of the heart at rest and exercise. Since for most of us, the majority of our day is spent fairly sedentary, this is very important. Similarly, the rise in blood pressure and heart rate with exercise will be attenuated which is also of major importance.  So that is why you are going to exercise every day and why you are going to exercise at least 30 minutes non-stop each time. 

Please go to the full text for much additional detail.

Gerald L. Evans, M.D.