How hard do I need to exercise?

In a previous post I wrote about a recent study that found only 10 minutes a day of exercise was enough to improve the fitness of overweight, older women.

The report I read didn’t elaborate about how hard the activity was, but I assume that if the women were not doing any exercise prior to the study, then anything would have been harder than their body was used to.

And that is the point. To get fitter, you have to exercise at a level that pushes your body past what is does normally.

Your body is an amazing piece of engineering that adapts to the demands placed on it.

It does this by increasing the size and strength of muscles, producing more oxygen carrying blood cells, increasing the enzymes that allow us to burn fat as a fuel, increasing the thickness and strength of our bones, increasing our ability to tolerate lactic acid and many other physiological changes.

The different ways in which the body adapts to exercise fill Exercise Physiology textbooks, however, all the changes are designed to do the same thing; keep our body in its ‘comfort zone’.

Now that probably sounds strange but the body’s systems work a bit like a thermostat and try to maintain the internal (inside the cells) environment as stable as possible.

When the cellular chemistry is disrupted, the body adapts to try and return it to ‘normal’. Here endeth the biochemistry lesson.

What does this mean for how hard you need to exercise to get fitter or stay fit?

You need to exercise at an intensity that pushes your body outside of its comfort zone.

It is only when your body is pushed outside of this zone that it has to adapt by some of the changes mentioned above. By doing this, it can then tolerate more intense exercise before it is pushed out of its ‘new’ comfort zone. This is how you get fitter. By continually expanding your ‘comfort zone’.

How quickly you get fitter is the product of how much exercise you do and how hard you exercise. Finding the right combination of these to achieve your goals is the key.

Obviously there are other factors that play a part such as genetics, your past fitness levels, your lifestyle and your age.

We’ll talk about these in future articles, but for now remember that to get fitter you have to push yourself beyond what your body is used to doing.

image: Pascal