I decided to mix up my exercise routine again so this weekend I pulled out a book I have about bodyweight exercises. It’s a great book and quite comprehensive but it does open with chapters that appear to extoll the superiority of bodyweight workouts over other forms of exercise. I’m all for tooting your own horn but when you get right down to it, there is truly no one “best exercise.” You’ll certainly find plenty of claims about what’s the “best exercise for weight loss” and what’s most efficient, purporting to offer the best results in the least amount of time but there are two facts that can’t be argued with. First, the “best” exercise is the one you’ll do! It doesn’t matter how great some routine is if you don’t have the ability to perform it or you dislike it and don’t do it regularly. And second, there is only one way to condition your heart and that’s the true key to improving your health for life.
I am always amused by claims you’ll see in the media for the amazing results you can supposedly get from some new workout DVD or exercise gadget. A lot of people won’t be able to work at the intensity level you’ll see demonstrated by the already-fit actors in the commercial. I’m sure many of you have had the experience of buying something and when you try it at home, you discover you can’t even get close to duplicating what you saw in the advertising! Or perhaps a product or routine claims you’ll burn loads of calories in just 30 minutes! Sounds good, until you find out you can barely keep up the activity for two minutes much less thirty!!
And while we read loads of claims about steady-state cardio, interval training, or various exercise gadgets and machines, most of the focus is put on trying to claim there’s a best exercise for weight loss. But really, health improvement is what matters and there is only one way to condition the most important muscle in your body—your heart. Raise your heart rate with the activity of your choice and keep it there. That’s it! You may have to experiment to find an activity you like that gets your heart pumping hard enough. The beauty of heart rate training is how your heart and your breathing will guide you how you’re doing. Tune into your body closely and you’ll know when you’ve reached your maximum level of performance. Pay attention to the numbers and you’ll see yourself gradually improving. You can feel yourself reaching higher heart rates with greater ease and it will take more work to keep going higher.
When I first started out working to condition my heart, I used kettlebell swinging. Early on, I’d be breathing very hard before I even reached 100 swings. Instead of one breath per swing, I found myself breathing “double time.” But it didn’t take long before I could bang out 100 swings, then 200, and up to 300 in one session with deep, rhythmic breaths. In fact, I became too well conditioned! I had to find a more intense exercise to push my heart rate higher! Now, I have to use the stairs in my building.
When I was visiting my parents last spring, I wrote about how I rode my mom’s bicycle around the gated community where they live. It was so great! The place is so large and there’s so little traffic that it was like having my own private track. I could pump hard on nice long straightaways and I’d find myself thinking about how I wanted to be able to feel like that for decades to come. I spent that month observing my parents’ state of health as they are aging and looking at all their friends and neighbors. There are always going to be some folks who seem to be genetically gifted but generally, keeping intensely active is the most critical element to supporting a long, healthy life.
So what is the “best exercise”? It’s not about the number of reps or how long you can stay on some machine. When you make health improvement your primary goal, it’s the activity and routine that you enjoy doing regularly and which offers you results you can measure and feel.
This is the book I mentioned:
This is a great basic strap from Polar. I do NOT recommend using strapless monitors that require you to stop exercising to check your heart rate. A monitor with a strap provides a real-time readout to the watch.
3 comments
Quite right–the best work out is one you’ll do and whatever you do, so does intensity. If you push hard, you don’t have to slog through hours of workouts. You’re also right about looking for improvement. People expect to see the same results as on TV rather than taking note of where they started where they are after a month, 2 months etc. One nice thing about a trainer is he points out progress that I hadn’t even noticed.
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Preachin’ to the converted!!!
I did have a trainer for awhile who would have me do a completely different workout every session. We’d do whatever she thought of so I realized after awhile that I did not know if I was improving or not. I switched to the powerlifting guy (and she didn’t like losing a client) but I liked it SO much better to be able to quantitatively follow my progress. She also made me feel like she just wanted to kick my butt and make me work, more than actually guiding and mentoring me. The experience with her was a part of the reason I wanted to become certified as a trainer so I could be different.
We rotate workouts every few weeks but from week to week it might be an increase in the number of push-ups or the amount of time I can successfully perform an exercise. Of course he also remembers that I had trouble getting on and off some of the machines. That the settings have changed for a smaller body. And now I basically need a booster chair for some of the machines because my butt is so much smaller! Strength, endurance, flexibility–I didn’t really see most of this as progress until he pointed it out.