The old guideline recommending 30 minutes of exercise three times a week just isn’t enough, according to the latest research. Athletes know that they need to work out every day, and all people who just want to stay healthy can benefit from the same type of exercise program.
Why Athletes Need to Exercise Every Day
Knowledgeable athletes train by stressing and recovering. You have to damage muscles to gain strength and enlarge muscles. You become more fit by taking a hard workout and then resting for a day or two than you will by exercising at the same leisurely pace every day. Every muscles is made up of thousands of fibers like a rope is made of many strands. Every fiber is made up of blocks called sarcomeres that fit end to end like a row of bricks. Sarcomeres butt upon each other, end-to-end, at Z-lines.
Muscles contract only at each Z-line. When you exercise vigorously, you damage these Z-lines and when they heal, the muscle fibers are stronger. So all athletes train by stressing and recovering. On one day, they take an intense workout to damage their muscles at the Z-lines. On the next day their muscles are sore and damaged and they exercise at a relaxed pace. When the muscles are healed and the soreness lessens, they take their next intense workout.
If athletes exercise at low intensity during the healing phase of the Z-lines, their muscle fibers will become stronger than if they rest. If they exercise vigorously when their muscles are sore, they are likely to tear them and be injured. Athletes need to exercise every day to gain maximum strength.
Why Non-Athletes Also Should Exercise Every Day
Forty percent of North Americans die of heart attacks. One of the common causes of the arterial damage that precedes heart attacks is a high rise in blood sugar after meals. Blood sugar always rises after meals and because of faulty lifestyle habits, most North Americans have blood sugars that rise too high. Resting muscles remove no sugar from the bloodstream, but contracting muscles remove sugar rapidly from the bloodstream and can do so without even needing insulin. This effect is strongest during exercise and diminishes to no benefit after about 17 hours. If you want to use exercise to help control blood sugar, you need to do it every day.
An Exercise Program for Everyone
Because a person with blocked arteries leading to the heart could suffer a heart attack during exercise, please check with your doctor before starting a new exercise program. Whatever activity you choose, try to exercise every day. If you are just starting out, spend about six weeks at a slow pace until you are comfortable in your activity. Then you are ready to alternate more intense days with easier workouts.
Intense Days
Stress refers to intensity, not the length of your workout. You can gauge the severity of the stress by the amount of burning you feel in your muscles during exercise. interval training means that you start out slowly, pick up the pace, slow down immediately when your muscles start to burn, recover by going very slowly for as long as you want, and then pick up the pace again.
On your hard days, warm up by going very slowly for five to 10 minutes. Going slowly at the start of a workout warms up muscles to help make them resistant to injury. If your muscles still feel tired or heavy, do not try interval training. Exercising with tired or sore muscles can cause serious injuries.
After you warm up, pick up the pace gradually until you feel burning in your muscles and immediately slow down. Then go at a very slow pace until the soreness goes away, your breath returns to normal and you feel recovered. How long it takes to recover is irrelevant. You take your next faster pick up when you feel that you have recovered, not from any preset time. Then pick up the pace until you feel burning again.
If you don’t compete, you do not ever need to go at 100 percent intensity. People who are just starting to do interval workouts should pick up the pace only slightly and not become short of breath. Slow down and get out of the burn as soon as you feel it. As soon as the burning and fatigue go away, and you are not breathing hard, try to pick up the pace again. In early workouts, you may only be able to do one hard pickup after you have just started your workout. Do not start your next pick up until your legs feel fresh. As soon as your legs start to feel heavy, stop the workout. Trying to increase the pace when your muscles feel sore and heavy invites injury.
Easy Days
The day after your hard workout your muscles will probably feel sore and you should take an easy workout. If the discomfort does not go away as you continue to exercise, is worse on one side of your body, or increases as you exercise, stop exercising immediately. You are injured and continuing to exercise will delay healing. Take off the next day also if you still feel sore in one place. If you feel better as you exercise casually, continue to exercise until you feel any discomfort or heaviness. Always stop every workout when your muscles feel heavy or sore. Keep on taking easy days where you exercise at low intensity until you feel fresh again. Do not do another hard workout until the soreness in your muscles has gone away.
My Recommendations
Every healthy person should try to exercise every day. You will gain a much higher level of fitness by “stressing and recovering”. That means to exercise more intensely on one day, feel sore on the next and go slowly. Only when your muscles feel fresh should you try to pick up the pace again.
Checked 6/2/23
