The Truth About Exercise [Video]

September 17, 2014 12:02 pm / Posted in

In The Truth About Exercise, British broadcaster Michael Mosley explores some truly amazing scientific discoveries about how the body responds to exercise. Here are the four main takeaways from the video:

1. There’s No “One Size Fits All”

Every body is different, and unfortunately, some people just aren’t ready for high intensity exercise. Limits on what you can do can come in many shapes. Some are physical: such as a cardiopulmonary condition, while others are psychological: such as simply not enjoying exercise. Either way, exercise works best when there’s an alignment between what your body can do and what your mind wants to do. That said…

2. Exercise is Not a Magic Bullet

One uncomfortable truth about exercise is that you probably won’t lose weight with exercise alone. Especially sustained light to moderate exercise, which doesn’t provide your body with a high enough burn to work off the typically high calorie, low nutrient diets that we lean towards in North America.

3. Think Intensity, Not Duration

Many people become frustrated when they work out for 150 minutes a week and don’t see the results they expect, but they don’t change their diets, and other habits. In this video, Mosley shows that you can achieve significant health results with as little as three minutes of high intensity impact training per week.

I’ve written before about how high intensity impact training works, and while it can help you achieve awesome results, it’s important to remember that the results Mosley achieves with a total of 12 minutes of exercise over four weeks relate to how his body processes blood glucose levels. They don’t reflect three of the most important numbers regarding health, such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and waist size. That said, his results do underline that you can achieve some pretty significant results with fairly little effort. Especially if you target what’s really killing you…

4. Chairs

There’s a wide body of research out there that now proves that sitting down for long periods of time is terrible for you. It cuts off circulation to your legs, and ensures that you are generally inactive for 8 to 12 hours a day. When you combine those numbers with the 8 hours people spend sleeping, most people are sedentary between 16 and 20 hours of every day; some even more!

Mosley and his guests have a simple solution: “Get up and move!” Find every opportunity you can to stand up and move. Have walking meetings. Get a standing desk. Buy a pedometer and set yourself target step goals (on average there are 1,320 steps in a kilometer).

I couldn’t agree more. I highly recommend you watch this video for more information and motivation about the simple changes you can make to improve your health.

– Burke

The Truth About Exercise


The Truth About Exercise by chance722

 

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