So, you take time out of your week to go to the gym… that’s great! One of the first steps to leading a healthier lifestyle is making time to exercise. Make your efforts count by choosing the most effective way to exercise.
The 2 Types Of Exercise
There are basically two types of exercise: aerobic exercise (also known as cardio) and resistance exercise. There are many variations of both. What each accomplishes is equally important as the other. (You can read more about that here.)
Aerobic exercise/cardio is any type of workout that concentrates on increasing your heart rate while conditioning your heart muscle. For example, this would include walking, jogging or biking.
Resistance training is a workout that specifically targets building your muscles. A couple examples would be lifting weights (dumbbells or resistance bands) and doing push ups (body weight).
A popular myth is that you should do all of your cardio first, and then move on to your resistance training. The thought behind that idea is that cardio exercise will warm the muscles before you train with resistance. This is true, but you actually don’t need 30 minutes to warm the muscles. Five minutes is a sufficient warm-up before resistance exercise. If your goal is to reduce body fat and increase muscle mass, a 5-minute warm up, resistance training for 20-25 minutes, then finishing with 20-30 minutes of cardio is an effective way to burn body fat. An even more effective way for conditioning the body and burning body fat is integrating high intensity interval training sessions during your workout. This eliminates the need for separate cardio sessions. Literature shows that 3-5 sets of 30-40 second high intensity movement, such as sprinting, is as effective as 30 minutes of jogging.
Timing Is Everything
Did you know that more exercise is not necessarily better?
Most people think they have to be at the gym for more than an hour. But exercising longer than an hour causes your body to start breaking down muscle tissue. Excessive exercising (either too long or too intense) causes muscle breakdown and increases cortisol, a stress hormone. When there’s too much cortisol in your body, you start storing fat. (And that’s obviously not what you want!)
2 Ideal Workouts
There are two ways to work out correctly.
Ideal Workout Method #1: Warm up by stretching/light jogging for 5 minutes. Do your resistance training first, for about 20 minutes. Follow that by 20 minutes of cardio.
Ideal Workout Method #2: We call this method HITT, or high intensity interval training. In this kind of training, you alternate between intervals of resistance training and cardio with intermittent rest periods.
Whichever method you choose, make sure to change up what exercises you’re doing every 3-4 weeks. Your body can get accustomed to specific exercises if you always do the same thing. Changing your training routine helps ensure that your efforts are giving you the best possible results.
Until next time, move well!
