Dr Doug McGuff and John Little, have produced a  book “Body by Science – a programme for complete fitness in 12 minutes a week.  They describe how to exercise efficiently without wearing our bodies out.  Think about our Caveman – he would have short bursts of intense exercise, when hunting or running from prey for example not mindless jogging every day. 

We have been told we need to do cardiovascular training and weights for optimum fitness, but when we do power exercises to our maximum, muscle strength stimulates mitochondria and heart function, which equals cardiovascular fitness.

Check out more details from his book or on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/bodybyscience

To summarise

  • The exercise has to be very slow but powerful, ideally for 45-90 seconds – this prevents damage to muscles and joints.
  • It must be sufficiently tiring that you couldn’t repeat the exercise and you can feel a build up of lactic acid.
  • This provides the maximum stimulus for enlarging muscles and glycogen stores.
  • Half of muscle weight is mitochondria – our energy cells, so increasing mitchochondria will increase our energy supplier.
  • After exercising a group of muscles, they must be rested for a week. This allows time for healing and repair, and to make more mitochondria.
  • Do not repeating the intensity of these exercises more than once a week it can cause muscle damage.

Although these exercises are shown using gym weights they can also be done using free weights are home or using no weights and your own body weight.

Exercising this way helps mobilise fat from fat stores, increases our glycogen stores which means less sugar is moved into fat cells, and increases our energy capacity . It also burns off excess sugar in the blood stream often released by stress.

 

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