Heart Exercise - What is the Secret Weapon For Longevity and Heart Health?

here are many studies that challenge the premise that prolonged and strenuous exercise is what promotes health, ideal fitness, and a stronger heart. This comes from a newer school of thought that says that the human body would gain much more from high-intensity (yet brief) duration exercises than with lengthy, regular, and low intensity exercises (American Journal of Physiology. Regulatory, Integrative & Comparative Physiology).

Why Is Exercise Not Popular?

Exercise is touted to be able to extend your life, improve the quality of living, and keep you young. Why then it is not as popular as it should be? People are overweight, continuously fighting some disease or other and inviting the risk of heart attack as early as mid-forties. Why are they not exercising and be rid of all these problems?

1. No time: we live in very demanding times where each one of us feels the need of an extension of the hours available in a day. Unfortunately, the number of hours is non-negotiable. Where is the extra time that you could use for exercising? 'Walk for 30 minutes every day', is a very common advice. However, no one tells you how you can squeeze in these 30 minutes when you are always sleeping at 2 AM in the morning trying to catch with various deadlines at work or home.

2. No strength: exercise is more needed as you suffer from the onslaught of age. Unfortunately, this is the time when your strength is not what it used to be and exercise rather crumples you up. Try starting aerobics at 48 and you will know what I mean. It is easier to give up on your rounding-up body and be philosophical about it, rather than gathering all your strength and adopting an exercising regime.

3. No motivation: it takes a long, long time to see any results even if you work yourself to near death every day. When you find that after three months your scales still do not make an appreciative move backwards, you rather lose hope in the applicability of exercise to your case.

So What Is The Solution?

Dr Al Sears, who researched this groundbreaking path for more than a decade, promotes a novel and highly effective method of controlling weight and maintaining exceptional health at any age. This method is based on the recognized fact that the high-intensity short-term period exercises are remarkably good for the health of your heart as well as promoting a loss of weight.

This research culminated in the birth of a weight-loss program called PACE or Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion. This is a method by which you accelerate your heartbeat through highest-intensity exercises in small bursts with short breaks in-between. These exercises would be practiced for a maximum 20 minutes period every day.

The results of this new method of exercising have been incredibly positive. People adopting this type of heart exercise have not only eliminated completely the risk of heart attack, but also reversed heart disease and a number of other age related ailments. They became healthy and surprisingly younger looking and energetic.

Prof Maureen MacDonald of the Department of Kinesiology, McMaster University is all out for this type of heart exercise. She says, "We wouldn't be surprised to see more rehabilitation programs adopt this method of training since it is often better tolerated in diseased populations".

Times are changing - hopefully, you will go along with it and enjoy its benefits.

Rajesh Nair