Have you ever followed an exercise plan religiously only to be frustrated that you still have that extra 10 pounds round your waist?
If so it will be helpful for you to know that health and fitness are not the same.
What do I mean exactly?
Well fitness is the physical ability to perform athletic activity. Health takes it one step further… it is a state where all systems in your body (nervous, muscular, skeletal, circulatory, digestive etc) are working at optimum levels.
Many people think that fitness implies health, the truth is that they don’t necessarily come together.
To achieve both health and fitness, you will need to know the difference between aerobic and anaerobic exercise.
1. Aerobic (“with oxygen”) – moderate exercise sustained over a period of time
2. Anaerobic (“without oxygen”) – exercises that produce short bursts of power
Most exercises fall within one of these categories. Usually the level of intensity with which you exercise determines whether you are using your aerobic or anaerobic system. Walking, jogging, yoga and swimming are exercises that can be either aerobic or anaerobic. Lower heart rates make them aerobic while higher heart rates make them anaerobic.
Your aerobic system is your system for endurance and encompasses the heart, lungs, blood vessels and muscles. If you activate your aerobic system with proper diet and exercise, you burn fat as your primary fuel.
Sports such as tennis, badminton and basketball are usually anaerobic.
Anaerobic exercise burns glycogen as its primary fuel. This causes your body to store fat.
Your choice of excercise and how you choose to exercise is crucial
Most Malaysians today have a fast-paced lifestyle that causes them to live in a highly anaerobic state. Daily stress and demands are compounded by the way they choose to exercise. As a result, they burn glycogen and train their metabolism to be anaerobic. This causes the body to use blood sugar as the primary fuel and keeps the fat in your system.
Not only that, the deficit in blood sugar may result in neuromuscular problems because our nervous system requires some two-thirds of blood sugar. The result can be headaches, disorientation, fatigue, anxiety or even depression!
To overcome this, you need to realize that all exercise programs require that we begin by building an aerobic base. To start, we focus on exercise which purely uses our aerobic system. This may range from 2-8 months. Properly doing this not only means better health, but could also help you burn fat from your hips and give you more energy.
By expanding your aerobic capacity, you expand your body’s ability to deliver oxygen to every organ and system in the body. This is crucial for health and vitality.
So if you’re new into yoga, don’t be tempted to go straight into the power vinyasa or astanga classes. Start with Yin and Basic Hatha classes and build up your endurance from there.