All Things Exercise

I have been asked a lot about exercise recently, especially with many gyms being closed and individuals trying to maintain their fitness levels or take this time to start exercising from home.
Some of the questions I have been asked are:

1. What is heart rate? How do you check your heart rate? What is a normal heart rate? What should my heart rate be with exercise?
2. Why is exercise programmed the way it is? Which type of program is better for me?
3. Does muscle really burn fat?
4. Which type of exercise burns more calories - strength training or cardio?
5. What conditions would prevent someone from participating in exercise?

Let's first discuss heart rate - this is the foundation for exercise. Your heart rate can give you a ton of information and help you with proper programming. It can also help you understand why you are doing what you are doing, even if someone else is programming for you. You don't have to do the thinking, but to understand why you are doing certain things for your body and the benefit of them is great.

Heart rate is how many times your heart beats in one minute as it pumps blood all over your body - into your muscles, your brain, your organs. You can check your heart rate several ways. There are heart rate monitors that you can wear around your chest. A lot of watches now will take your heart rate. If you want tot check you heart rate manually, take 2 fingers and hold it on the side of your wrist where you feel the pulse. You can either count the number of beats for a whole minute or you can count for 30 seconds and multiple by 2. You can also check the pulse in your neck. However, many health care professionals recommend the wrist because it is safer as the neck is pushing on the carotid artery which flows to the brain.

A normal heart rate is considered anywhere between 60-100 beats per minute. It's ok to be a little bit lower or a little higher depending on the situation. A lower heart rate is associated with less cardiovascular disease risk and being healthier. However, you don't want your heart rate to get too low because each beat, each pump, is sending blood out to your body. A higher heart rate is an indication of how hard your heart is working. So if you have a heart rate of 100 or greater just sitting at rest, that usually indicates that your heart is working too hard. We don't want our heart working that hard at rest.

Recommended heart rate for exercise is going to vary for the individual as well as the exercise. The easiest way to know your maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age. If you are 29, your maximum heart rate should be 220-29 = 191 bpm. This method is not 100% accurate, and there are more accurate methods of determining your max heart rate. However, this is the easiest one and it's good enough for what we are discussing. When you are working out, you are going to base your percentages off of your maximum heart rate. Very light exercise is going to be about 60% of your maximum heart rate. When we get into moderate exercise, it will move to 60-75% of your max heart rate. Vigorous exercise will be 75-95% of your max heart rate.

Very light exercise will improve your overall health, which is just moving your body or doing recovery. When we are talking about fat burning and building muscles, that's where we are getting to moderate and vigorous activity. Moderate exercise (65-85% max HR) is going to improve your aerobic fitness, and vigorous exercise (85-95% max HR) is going to address your performance capacity and your speed.

Aerobic exercise is when you have enough oxygen to sustain your body. So you are breathing heavy, but you are taking in enough oxygen that your muscles can function for longer periods of time. This will trigger fat burning and improve your cardiovascular health and endurance which is good because we want to have strong hearts and lungs. Anaerobic exercise is your high intensity interval training, sprints, things that get you so out of breathe that you can only sustain it for 1-2 minutes max before your muscles are burning. You don't have enough oxygen to keep up so you have to tap into your body's energy stores which is going to matter for weight loss and gaining lean muscle. Typically anaerobic activity is more high impact which promotes strengthening of our bones, joints, tendons and ligaments.

So why do people tell you to do the exercises they tell you to do? It's to tap into both systems - both systems have a purpose. We want to help our cardiovascular system and we also want to build lean muscle and strengthen our bones and challenge our bodies. When we mix the two effectively, that is when we get the optimal benefits to our body. So how do we mix the two and how do we decide? It really depends on your goals. If you are a marathon runner, or a triathlete, or have really long workouts greater than 30 minutes, then you are going to have to train your aerobic system a lot more than someone who is doing a CrossFit style workout or someone who just wants to be health, gain muscle and lose fat. 

Whenever you are working with a trainer or fitness professional, you have to know what your goals are. If you goal is to run a marathon in the next year, then you need to spend more time training your aerobic system instead of your anaerobic system. If you want to go to the Olympics and do a sprint, then you need to spend time training your anaerobic system, your speed. If you want to be a generally healthy individual, help your heart, your lungs, your bones, your ligaments, your muscles and just live life well, you want to do both.

Another important piece of exercise programming is intentionally working both sides of your body. So many times we do a lot of core work that brings the body forward, but we aren't opening up and working on the back. Then people wonder why they have back pain or poor posture - it gets neglected a lot because we want abs. Same thing with athletes that have shoulder pain. A lot of times they are pushing - doing push ups, bench press, overhead press - and they are not working on opening up the chest and using the back muscles. If you are having shoulder pain, you may be relying too much on your front body and not enough on your back body.

You may have heard that muscle builds more than fat, so if you want to lose weight, strength train. This is true, but I want to explain to you why. There are 3 ways that our body burns energy, or calories. In order to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit overall. So at the end of the day, end of the week, end of the month you have to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. The first way your body burns energy is your basal metabolic rate. This is the calories burned if you just laid in bed all day and did nothing but breathe and equals 60-80% of your energy expenditure. There is also a small amount of your energy expenditure that comes from eating food called the Thermic Effect of Food. It is a small amount so don't go eat more thinking you will burn more calories, that's not how that works. The third way you expend energy is through physical activity. 

We can modulate your physical activity to burn more calories, but we can also modulate your basal metabolic rate. There are 3 main factors that go into your resting metabolic rate, the first 2 of which we can't control

1. Gender - women expend less energy than men, in general
2. Age - if you have the same body composition at 20 as you have at 40, at 40 you will be expending less energy at rest simply because of your age.

What we can control is the 3rd thing that makes up your basal metabolic rate and that is your muscle mass. Muscle tissue expends more energy than fat tissue. So increasing your muscle mass increases your basal metabolic rate, and, regardless of anything else that you do, you will burn more calories, or expend more energy.

What conditions would prevent someone from participating in exercise? If you have a heart condition or chest pain at rest or during physical activity, any fitness professional should tell you to go check with your doctor before engaging in new physical activity. If you have any condition where you suddenly lose consciousness, such as seizures or random passing out spells, that would be a safety hazard with exercise so you would want to check with your doctor first. The last checkpoint would be any bone condition that could be negatively impacted by physical activity such as osteoporosis, osteopenia and brittle bone disease. 

With all that being said, a fitness professional should be able to modify for you and your level of activity and what you need as an individual in most, if not all, circumstances. There is no reason that you should not be able to participate in physical activity in general. This includes something that causes pain, or referring you to someone who can help you with your pain. In general, physical activity is good for everybody. If you have a heart condition, physical activity is good to strengthen your heart within the parameters set by your doctor. If you have a joint condition, physical activity is good to strengthen your muscles and lubricate your joints. If you have a bone condition, physical activity is good to help you lay down new bone and make you more resilient. There is no condition that I can think of that physical activity is not good for. Movement is medicine! Whether it is gentle yoga, taking a walk or doing some sort of strength training to make your body more resilient. Barring any significant medical condition that needs to be cleared by your doctor, I do not believe that there are any conditions that would prevent someone from participating in exercise. It may need to be modified for you or you may need a substitution or an alternative, but I would almost never say not to participate.