WHAT IS THE TRUE PURPOSE OF EXERCISE?
Blog - WHAT IS THE TRUE PURPOSE OF EXERCISE?
“The true purpose of exercise is to send a repetitive message to the body, asking for improvement in metabolism, strength, and aerobic (lung) capacity.”
Most people think the reason we exercise is simply to burn calories. The true purpose of exercise is to send messages to the body requesting enhanced physical capabilities such as improvements in metabolism, strength, and aerobic (lung) capacity.
Between weight training and cardio, weight training gives the bigger metabolic bang for the buck.
Seldom do we prescribe cardio in our training programs. Many people’s perception of cardio is many hours spent on a treadmill, running or biking every day at the park or around the neighborhood, or high intensity exercise classes like CrossFit or BodyPump. They believe they are burning lots of fat with all that activity. Sadly, that is often not the case.
The key to fat loss is being able to change your metabolism to utilize the maximum amount of oxygen. It’s much easier to alter your metabolism through resistance training than cardio. You need to force your body to work in the anaerobic domain before you can be proficient in the aerobic domain. Because your body depends on air to live, forcing cells beyond their ability to “breathe” causes them to release performance-enhancing hormones to survive. When done consistently, these hormones change your metabolism. Anaerobic work is done in short intervals like what you do when you perform weight training sets.
If you were to do cardio one hour per day seven days a week, you would only be exercising about 4% of the time. Even though you feel as though you are exercising your head off you cannot expect significant fat loss. So, as you can see, it really doesn’t matter how many calories you burn during a cardio session but rather how your body functions throughout the day in response to the type of exercise you choose to do. These are some of the things that weight training will do for your body
- Increases insulin sensitivity (then you won’t need as much insulin -a WIN for fat loss!!)
- Decreases cellulite (contracting muscles improve flow of the lymph system)
- Increases glycogen storage (the more muscle to put glucose in, the less gets stored as fat)
- Sweating is an excretory function (Detox! Kidneys don’t have to do all the work)
- Lipase enzymes are activated by heat. They break up fat to feed to the working muscle to burn instead of sugar. This continues up to 15 hrs after work out!
- Increases resting metabolic rate (your body has to restore its core temp and repair tiny muscle tears.) Speeding up metabolism lowers citrate levels, thus lowering fat production.
- Increases lung capacity allowing for more oxygen. Fat only burns if enough oxygen is available. More Oxygen =more fat burn!
- Increases muscle mass. Fat is burned in the muscle. More muscle=more fat is burned
- Resistance training increases testosterone & HGH anabolic hormones. These burn fat.