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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – February is the month of love with Valentine’s Day and American Heart Month, that is! And this Friday, February 4th, is “National Wear Red Day”, created to heighten awareness that taking care of our heart is vital to our life. Cardiovascular exercise a vital component contributing to heart health, is important to keeping our heart beating, and to our weight loss efforts, as well. Commonly known as aerobic exercise, cardiovascular exercise burns body fat, and strengthens our hearts, our lungs and our blood vessels. Recent research also suggests that it improves our brain functioning too! So, let’s define aerobic exercise, discuss more reasons to start or improve our aerobic program, and then we can begin (sneakers ready?)!
What is Aerobic Exercise?
Aerobic exercise is defined as sustained repetitive exercise that elevates our heart rate increasing our consumption of oxygen. It involves our largest muscle groups, the buttocks and legs. We are exercising aerobically when we fast walk, run, cycle, swim or cross-country ski. The primary purpose is to increase our body’s ability to take in more oxygen, and transport it to all the cells and organs of our body (Including our brain!). If I can walk up a flight of stairs with less huffing and puffing than my best friend, one likely explanation is that I am in better aerobic or cardiovascular shape. My heart, vascular system and lungs can deliver more oxygen and nutrients to my legs and body faster and more efficiently, as well as remove the metabolic waste (this refers to the waste products as the result of energy made and released). The extra good news for us weight watchers, is that fatty acids are the primary source of fuel burned during extended endurance or aerobic exercise (Higher amounts of fat stores used as fuel begin around 20 minutes and continue to increase the longer we go).
Need more motivation? Here are a few more reasons to step up our cardio program.
The Benefits
Weight Control. Aerobic exercise helps us to burn our body fat stores. The optimal percentage of fatty acids used for energy begins around 20-30 minutes and continues to be burned in higher amounts the longer we go!
Increased Endurance. This is important to us as we go through our daily activities. We increase our oxygen consumption ability, which increases our stamina. Stronger hearts, lungs, blood vessels, increased muscular endurance and an increase in other blood factors such as red blood cells, all make us a more efficient machine (So important for expressing our love on Valentine’s Day!)!
Hormonal Regulation. Regular moderate aerobic exercise helps to regulate insulin and other hormones including those harmful stress hormones. It also helps to promote hormonal release of a gas known as Nitric Oxide in our blood vessels, which helps to dilate them and keep them elastic. Aerobic exercise helps to raise our HDL cholesterol levels (The good cholesterol!). If all of this wasn’t enough, our brain produces and releases our own opiate type neurotransmitters commonly known as endorphins during aerobic exercise (Generally begin to be released after 20-30 minutes). Can’t take the pain of aerobic exercise? Let’s start slowly and see how good we’ll feel!
Enhanced Immune Function. One hypothesis that explains this is that the rise in core body temperature mimics a fever, an immune response, which kills invading bugs. And research also points to a positive correlation between regular moderate cardiovascular exercise to an increase in immune cell production (unfortunately, I’m not referring to running marathons here).
Monitoring our heart rate is important during training especially during aerobic training. This is how we can judge that we are increasing our fitness level. Each of us have what is called a “Training Heart Rate Zone”. It can also give us something to focus on instead of the discomfort or the clock! It is also important to monitor our heart rate for our safety especially if we have special medical considerations including a wonderful one, “pregnancy”.
There are different heart rate prescriptions for our needs depending upon how fit we are, how old we are, and whether we are on medications etc. We can tailor our heart rate prescription depending upon our goals too, say we want to lose weight but can’t sustain high intensity for a long period of time, or we do not want to lose weight, but just increase our fitness level (How lucky is that?). Our heart rate prescription will also change as we become more fit, and generally we can increase the intensity as we do. As we become more fit, we need more workload or intensity to achieve our heart rate zone. Lastly, monitoring our heart rate can help to motivate us since witnessing our improvements can feel really good. Most health clubs have posters that give training heart rate zones by age, and most cardiovascular machines give a chart as well.
Shall we begin? Want to know how to calculate your heart rate training zone? Next week, we’ll “Measure the Beat”! Want to purchase exercise books that are from a credible source based upon scientific evidence? Go to http://www.exerciseismedicine.org/acsmbookspublic.htm
Follow me Junefit on Twitter every Sunday for a new weight loss tool taken from my book, and follow my blogs at Voskos Greek Yogurt Click here http://www.voskos.com/fresh/
Here’s to American Heart Month, Exercise, and Our Health!
June M. Lay M.S.
JuneFit
For More info on National Wear Red Day go to http://www.goredforwomen.org/wearredday/resources/documents/WRDPromotionalFlyerHR.pdf, and here is a link to even more info and links to a National Red Day Toolkit http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/educational/hearttruth/materials/wear-red-toolkit.htm
June is a certified Health & Fitness Specialist A.C.S.M. Please seek the advice of your physician when starting a new cardiovascular exercise program, especially if you are over 40 or have medical considerations.
Junefit is included in Google’s top ranked women’s health resources http://directory.google.com/Top/Health/Women’s_Health/Resources/
June is Lifestyle Columnist at www.healthnewsdigest.com/
(c) junefit 2010
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