While low-intensity aerobic exercise is not harmful, it is simply not very efficient in stimulating fat burning for most people. The exception to this is the person with the adrenal type of weight deposition.
For someone who is primarily an adrenal type (pendulous, sagging lower abdomen or stomach “pooch” – for more information on figuring out what hormone type you are, visit www.trainyourbrain4weightloss.com/bodytypequiz.html), the recommended exercise is 45 to 60 minutes of aerobic exercise 3 times per week, with a day of rest in-between exercise sessions. If you are not used to exercising, or if you get fatigued easily, it is best to start out at about 10 to 15 minutes per session and gradually increase over a
period of a few weeks until you are doing 60 minutes per session. If you start out too quickly, you will get very sore, and you may get
discouraged from exercising before you really even get started. So, if
you are not used to exercise, start out with what seems very easy and gradually increase.
Aerobic exercise is anything you can do that gets your heart rate and breathing rate up, but you are still able to carry on a normal conversation without gasping for breath. There are calculations and ways to determine your “ideal” aerobic training heart rate, but these methods are not all that practical for most people. They depend first on
being able to find your pulse at your wrist or neck – which some people have difficulty doing – and then doing some basic math calculations – also problematic for some people. For the sake of simplicity, all you need to do to get an aerobic training effect is to exercise intensely enough to be breathing harder than you usually do when just sitting/standing around or walking slowly, but not so hard that you are gasping for air. The term “aerobic” simply means “with oxygen”, so you can think of aerobics as any exercise that doesn’t get you too out of breath to talk. Walking is one of the simplest and most available forms of aerobic exercise. Other forms of aerobic exercise include swimming, bicycling, aerobics (surprisingly enough), and elliptical machines.
If you are extremely out of shape, some of these forms of exercise might not be aerobic for you. If you find yourself gasping for breath, you are
no longer doing aerobic exercise, you are doing anaerobic (meaning
“without oxygen”) exercise, and this is not advisable for the adrenal body type. For someone who finds him or her self gasping for breath with almost any whole body movement, I recommend starting with seated exercises in which you simply move your arms and legs repeatedly. Do only as much as you can without getting winded.
Start out at maybe 5 or 10 minutes and gradually build up the amount of time you spend doing the exercises. Once you can do the arm and leg exercises for 30 minutes without getting out of breath, start trying to
walk or use a stationary bicycle or elliptical machine for 5 or 10 minutes in addition to the arm and leg exercises and gradually switch over to doing the walking or bicycling and increase time until you are up to 60
minutes 3 days per week. It may take a while to build up to this, but that’s OK, just make a consistent effort and you will get there.
If you have any other type of weight deposition besides the adrenal
type, relatively short periods of relatively intense anaerobic exercise will be much more efficient than aerobic exercise in stimulating fat burning.
This statement is contrary to what has been “common knowledge” for many years, and contradicts what is still the advice of many fitness
experts. So, before I go into the specifics of my recommendations, let’s first look at a common misconception about exercise.
Many experts still recommend at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 3 or more times per week as the preferred exercise to induce weight loss. This is based on findings that it takes a minimum of about 30 minutes of exercise (of any kind) to burn up the body’s stored sugar and then
switch to burning fat. To burn fat in any significant amount with aerobic exercise, you really need about 60 minutes of exercise at a time. Even
intense anaerobic exercise will not put your body into fat-burning mode
at less than about 30 minutes – at the time you are doing the exercise
(this is the key distinction). So, if you look solely at the fat burning that occurs at the time you are doing the exercise, 30 to 60 minutes or longer are required to burn significant amounts of fat, and since most
people can’t do high-intensity anaerobic exercise for that long, the usual
recommendation is to go with lower-intensity aerobic exercise.
What the experts promoting aerobic exercise have overlooked is the fat burning that occurs after the exercise session is over. High-intensity anaerobic exercise stimulates the release of growth hormone, adrenaline, and testosterone, and these hormones in turn promote
fat-burning approximately 24 to 48 hours after the intense exercise session. In fact, a 20 to 40 minute session of high-intensity anaerobic exercise with several rest breaks (about 15 to 20 minutes of actual exercising) typically produces much more fat burning in the long-run than 60 minutes of low-intensity aerobic exercise (and that’s continuous exercise with no breaks). To reiterate, the high-intensity anaerobic program is the most efficient method to induce fat burning, except for someone with adrenal-type weight. The reason high-intensity exercise is not recommended for the adrenal-type is because high-intensity exercise will stimulate cortisol release, and adrenal-types already produce excess cortisol which causes lower abdominal fat deposition. Adrenal types should stick to the longer periods of less-intense exercise as discussed previously.
Now that we have that misconception out of the way, let’s discuss anaerobic exercise. As mentioned earlier, anaerobic means “without air”, and anaerobic exercise is any type of exercise that leaves you too out of breath to talk for at least brief periods of time. Many types of anaerobic exercise fall under the category of “interval training”, which is basically short bursts (intervals) of high-intensity exertion, followed by short periods where you “catch your breath”. Many different types of exercise can fit this description: weight lifting, running sprints, basketball, soccer, high-intensity aerobics (even though they are called aerobics, if you’re gasping for air, it’s anaerobic), spin classes, kick- boxing, etc.. Any of these types of exercise are great for people trying
to lose weight (except for the adrenal-types). My advice is to try different things and stick with what you enjoy.
For those people who are already used to exercising, if you choose types of exercise where you have some control over the pace (running sprints, kick-boxing, etc.), I recommend what Dr. Guy Schenker calls “Grizzly Bear Intervals” – called that because he says to imagine you are being chased by a grizzly bear when you do them. This entails running (swimming, bicycling, etc.) full-out for 30 seconds to 1 minute, and then resting until your heart rate begins to return to normal and you
can breathe well-enough to talk, then go full-out again for 30 seconds to a minute and rest again. Repeat this cycle of full-out exertion and resting until your heart rate and breathing are taking more than 2 minutes to return to the point at which you can talk normally again (“talk normally” is defined as not needing to pause between words to gasp for breath). When this happens, you have done enough for one exercise session. Most people who are in decent shape will reach this point within 6 to 8 cycles, which is usually about 20 or 30 minutes of total session time. If you find you can only last for 2 or 3 cycles, I suggest reducing the intensity or time of the exercise part of the intervals somewhat so you can at least get 5 or 6 cycles in before reaching the point where it takes longer than 2 minutes to be able to talk without gasping on your rest part of the interval.
If you are extremely out of shape, I recommend starting with the exercises previously discussed for the adrenal-types and gradually work into doing very brief bursts of anaerobic exercise (perhaps 10 to 15 second bursts of exercise that gets you out of breath, followed by a minute or so to recover before doing another 10 to 15 second burst of activity). Depending on your level of conditioning, this might be fast walking, jogging, or weight training.
If you want some variety from doing the interval training just discussed, or if you are trying to build muscle, resistance training is great. Resistance can come in the form of free weights (barbells and hand weights), weight machines, exercise tubing, your own body weight, or
the use of miscellaneous household items you can use as weights (cans of food, or bottles of water or other liquids can work as make-shift hand weights). If you belong to a gym or health club, I recommend you work
with one of the club’s personal trainers or instructors to not only show you how to use the equipment, but also to develop and overall training program for you according to your goals.
It is important not to overtrain, as this will overtax the adrenals and begin to interfere with weight loss. So how do you know if you’re overtraining? There is a simple trick that was developed some years ago by what was then the Soviet Union’s Olympic training program. If your body temperature varies from your normal by ½ a degree above or below your baseline, you should rest on that day and not work out. To use this method, before you begin (or change) your exercise program, take your body temperature first thing in the morning for three or four days. Assuming all of those readings are consistently within ½ of a degree of each other, take the average of those readings to use as your baseline. Then take your temperature first thing in the morning on days you plan to exercise and if you are more than ½ of a degree above or
below your baseline, you should postpone your exercise to the next day.
Now, if your temperature is more than ½ degree above or below your baseline for more than 2 consecutive days, you may need to re-assess
your baseline because it may have changed due to changes in diet, medication, or a weight-loss supplement you may have started using. Another possibility is that you may be fighting an infection of some type, and although it is usually OK to exercise lightly while sick, it is a good idea not to do intense exercise during this time. Some women may also have changes in body temperature that last more than 2 days around
the menstruation phase of their cycles, and here again although light exercise is acceptable, intense exercise is not recommended during this
time.
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