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Home : About Your Body : Essential Exercise

Exercise is essential to a healthy body for many reasons. It is a
critical part of the processes that maintain our fitness levels and
prevent health problems.

Exercise: Make Your Workouts Work for You
First and foremost, exercise helps keep our hearts strong and our arteries flowing. Exercise also stimulates the calcium-building process in our bones, so we can slow the bone-thinning, debilitating disease of old age: osteoporosis.
When done properly, exercise helps keep the slippery fluid in our joints flowing and helps maintain healthy cartilage, thus easing the joint friction that leads to arthritis. So exercise benefits the heart, arteries, bones, and joints, but that's not all.

Most importantly, exercise helps keep our muscles conditioned by building and maintaining their mass. Maintaining healthy muscle mass means continued strength and the ability to maintain your ideal weight. The more muscle mass you acquire and maintain, the more calories you burn throughout the day. This is because more muscle equals better metabolism, which uses more fuel, even when you are at rest.

Exercise is The Other Energy

For most people who decide that they want (or need) to lose weight, the knee-jerk response is "I've got to get to the gym." Few of these people look forward to scheduled exercise and view it as a painful step to weight loss. Many people mistakenly believe that exercise is more important than a healthy diet when it comes to any type of weight management.

It is our eating habits that profoundly affect our personal well-being and longevity and act as the primary force for shedding body fat and regulating metabolism. Exercise burns calories, but it is most important in maintaining your weight. In the absence of a properly managed diet, exercise alone will at best just slow fat production and storage. So if you want lasting results and better overall health proper exercise is essential.

Exercise is Energy Exerted I like to think of exercise as the other energy-the energy we exert in order to burn more calories. Like the energy we take in (food), the energy we put out (exercise) is a matter of quantity and quality. Remember how ATP is produced from the three fuel groups-fats, carbohydrates, and protein-to supply energy to its needed destination? Exercise uses up a lot of ATP, so when more is needed, fat cells are called on to produce a new supply, thus indirectly reducing fat stores.

Quality, Not Quantity
The biggest problem with exercise is that most people look at it like a chore, something they have to do. It doesn't have to be this way. You can exercise effectively in less time and with less effort than you think. Different exercises produce different results.
Whether your goals require fat loss, muscle toning, muscle building, aerobic conditioning, cross-training, or a combination of them all, your physical efforts should be specific to your goals and need not be excessive. Too many people learn too late that more exercise is not better. They exercise more than they should, or perform maneuvers that are not effective in helping them reach their goals. This limits their achievements, creates disappointment, can cause injuries, and ultimately contributes to the high dropout rate.

The key to an effective exercise and weight-loss program involves three parameters: technique, repetitions, and breathing. Huffing and puffing programs and "no pain, no gain" thinking are a thing of the past. Research has shown that results in any area of exercise can be achieved with a lot less time and effort than traditional physical training programs.

The Dynamic Duo: The Combined Power of Diet and Exercise
Fact: you can essentially produce any change in your body by using a combination of diet modifications and different physical training techniques. Reducing your caloric intake while burning more calories will obviously help increase your weight loss odds, but there's more to it than that. Here are some encouraging examples:

1. Did you know that your metabolism is designed to be fueled every two to three hours? Yes, you can manage your weight easier and have better overall health by eating smaller meals five to seven times a day.

2. Medical research shows that the most effective tool for living longer and enjoying better health is eating less. Animals that were allowed to overeat at every meal had more heart disease, diabetes, cancer than the ones that simply ate less. And the one who ate less lived 20 percent longer!

3. Did you know that your metabolism burns at a faster rate for many hours after most conditioning exercises are finished? That means a larger portion of your next meal will be burned off instead of being stored in your body as extra calories if you exercise before.

4. Timing between exercises is important as well as eating particular foods before or after exercise because both can make it easier to create and maintain muscle mass. This means less total exercise is required, creating a less stressful fitness cycle that constantly feeds off itself to ensure that you reach your goals and maintain them once they are achieved.