Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can
ride.
—Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orleans (1798)
How much exercise should you do each day? If you’re like us, you would rather spend as little time on exercise as is required to maintain a reasonable level of cardiovascular conditioning. Well, we have good news for you. The most effective type of exercise can provide good cardiovascular conditioning in only 30 minutes a week.
Exercise has often been associated with tedious workouts, done as a sort of duty, rather than for pleasure. Recently, there have been attempts to involve people in what are believed to be healthful and enjoyable exercise routines, such as jogging. Some people do enjoy spending an hour or two running each day. However, many others either do not have the time available or else simply prefer to pursue other interests in their leisure hours.
There are four general benefits of regular exercise of the
proper type:
- Muscles, including heart muscle, can be kept in condition, that is, at an efficient level of work output and capable of heavy peak work demands.
- Regular exercise uses up calories that might otherwise be stored as fat.
Psychologically, a person who keeps his or her body fit has a sense of well-being and may be able to perform better under physically and emotionally demanding conditions of stress.
- The proper type of exercise causes the release of growth hormone from the brain’s pituitary gland. Growth hormone has an important stimulant effect on the immune system, builds muscles, and burns fats. Recently, however, evidence obtained from the BLSA (the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, an ongoing study of over 800 healthy persons given a battery of biomedical and sociobehavioral tests at intervals) indicates that in healthy men and women the release of growth hormone in response to exercise ceases after about the age of 30. The physically active adult BLSA men had no greater muscle mass than their age-matched peers who were sedentary, illustrating their loss of exercise-stimulated growth hormone release. In addition, no muscle mass differences attributable to physical activity have been found between older women who are active and those who are sedentary. There are ways for older people to increase pituitary release of growth hormone.
What is the best type of exercise? That depends first on what type of effects you are looking for. The exercise which is designed for effective cardiovascular system conditioning is not the same as the exercise you should do for athletic prowess. We describe here a system of exercise which is specifically aimed at cardiovascular conditioning, fat loss, and muscle
building. It is not designed to make you into an athlete. It should be exercise you enjoy enough to do regularly. Next, the exercise which causes the most rapid cardiovascular conditioning effects, as well as the greatest release of growth hormone in younger people, is peak effort expended over a short period of time rather than a less-than-peak effort over a longer time period. Regularly running full tilt up a hill for several minutes conditions the cardiovascular system and, in younger people, causes the release of growth hormone. Jogging for a few miles, unless there is peak effort, releases little or none, and is not very efficient for cardiovascular conditioning. Cardiovascular conditioning can be achieved much more effectively with peak effort exercise.
If you enjoy jogging (it does release the brain’s natural morphine-like compounds, the endorphins and enkephalins, giving many joggers a euphoric high), do it—but remember, there is little evidence of health benefits from jogging. The New York Academy of Science held a symposium on the physiology of marathon runners—but the papers delivered at
the meeting reported that no health benefits were found. However, recent evidence suggests that marathon running may increase serum content of HDL (high density lipoproteins), which provides protection against heart attacks. In order to make sure that runners do not have high HDL to begin
with (rather than increasing the level by running), we need to see studies which examine before and after HDL levels. – Such studies are necessary because we do know that marathon runners constitute a low-risk group for other factors: they tend to be lean nonsmokers, highly educated, health and
nutrition oriented, and generally without such disorders as hypertension. A sample of runners is unlikely to contain many chain-smoking, alcoholic, obese, sedentary, junk-food junkies, which might mean that the observed results were caused by a selection bias. Another recent study found an increase in fibrinolytic (blood clot dissolving) activity in healthy adult humans who participated in a ten-week vigorous physical conditioning program.
Dr. Lawrence E. Morehouse, in the excellent book Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a Week, reports his findings that about ten minutes of peak effort every other day gave the most benefits in terms of cardiovascular conditioning.
Ten minutes every other day will earn you 80 percent of the cardiovascular conditioning benefits of exercising for hours every day.
You need not spend a lot of time doing exercises. And you can choose any type that appeals to you, provided peak effort is required. You will find that this type of exercise raises the heart rate considerably. This is how you know when you are exerting the desirable peak output.
If this sounds too good to be true, we should mention that Dr. Morehouse was formerly the director of NASA’s manned space flight physiology research program and was the founding director of the Human Performance Laboratory of the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Morehouse’s statements are not wild opinion; they are facts firmly based on careful instrumental measurements of human exercise performance. Dr. Morehouse has written a fine book on this subject for laymen which
is available in paperback.
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