The Life Plan (47 page)

Kenneth Cooper, M.D., first popularized the term “aerobic exercise.” Back in the 1960s, Cooper became curious about why some people who had excellent muscular strength did very poorly with endurance activities like long-distance running, swimming, and bicycling. He began measuring human performance in terms of a person’s ability to use oxygen, which led to his groundbreaking book
Aerobics,
which included science-based exercise programs using running, walking, swimming, and bicycling. His book provided the scientific rationale for almost all of today’s aerobics programs that are based on oxygen-consumption equivalency.

Aerobic exercise is also known as cardiovascular or “cardio” work, because it challenges the cardiovascular system and increases cardiovascular capacity by overloading the heart and lungs, forcing them to work harder than they do at rest. Your heart’s ability to deliver blood (and therefore oxygen) to your working muscles and your muscles’ ability to synthesize large amounts of ATP enable you to increase your cardiorespiratory fitness. The whole point of aerobics is to improve your ability to consume, transport, and use oxygen in all the thousands of biochemical reactions that go on continuously in your body—reactions that sustain health, prevent disease, and keep you from getting old.

When I slack off on my aerobics, I find that I lose control over my eating, even if I continue with my resistance training workout. I’m sure this is because without cardio workouts, my endorphin levels become low. Endorphins are opioid peptides we produce in our brains during exercise, excitement, pain, consumption of certain foods, and orgasm that produce analgesia and a feeling of well-being. Cardio also elevates my mood, enables me to handle stress better, increases my energy level throughout the day, and keeps me feeling young by helping me stay fit and lean.

Research in heart disease and exercise published in 1999 marked a dynamic shift in our thinking about aerobic exercise. Before that research, the cardiology community believed that anyone with heart disease should rest, even prescribing prolonged rest. Now physicians are instructing men with heart disease to engage in supervised moderate-to-vigorous exercise. That’s true for both prevention and treatment of heart disease. Aerobic exercise is important after a heart attack, angioplasty, bypass surgery, and heart implantation. The reasons are as varied as there are types of aerobic exercise.

We now know that regular aerobic exercise prevents age-related loss of endothelial function, the vitally important lining of your heart and blood vessels. What’s more, studies show that exercise can restore damaged endothelium to healthy levels in previously sedentary middle-aged and older healthy men.

Consistent aerobic exercise also protects the myocardium (your heart muscle). Joseph W. Starnes, Ph.D., internationally known for his cardiovascular research, focuses on the association between exercise and its ability to help protect the heart during a heart attack as well as the effects of exercise, aging, and nutrition on the heart. Before his groundbreaking research, doctors believed that it took weeks or months of regular exercise to gain any degree of protection for the heart. Yet Starnes showed that even a single exercise session stimulates the heart to increase its synthesis of protective proteins, called stress proteins. Within twenty-four hours after exercising, Starnes says, these proteins increase enough to protect the heart against a variety of physical stresses.

However, exercise that is too low in intensity will not do the job. You must reach a certain threshold of intensity before cardiac protection is realized. Starnes claims that moderate exercise for 60 minutes can increase your protection greatly. In fact, he thinks exercise intensity above moderate improves the protection gain by only a modest amount. On the flip side, low-intensity exercise shows little, if any, cardiac protection. In short durations, exercise may provide indirect protection, helping to improve cholesterol levels and lowering blood pressure, but no increase in protective proteins is achieved.

Regular exercise training protects the heart from injury during a heart attack. However, Starnes’s research also shows that exercise-induced cardiac protection is lost once regular exercise is stopped, which forces the synthesis of those protective proteins to come to a halt. In approximately a week, you will be back to whatever your pre-exercise level was.

Let’s go over that again: No matter how long or how intensely you’ve been training . . . stop, and in less than seven days, you’re almost back to where you started. You’ve lost your ability to make these protective stress proteins, and you’ve put your heart back at risk.

It is virtually impossible to reduce body fat without cardio exercise. While resistance training and correcting your hormone deficiencies will help get rid of some body fat, in order to really tap into your fat stores, you must do cardio, and do it for prolonged periods.

Cardio exercise increases the amount of calories your body needs to carry out its normal functions throughout the day and night, long after

you have completed the exercise. This is called your resting metabolic rate. The higher the metabolic rate, the more calories you burn every day.

An increased resting metabolic rate increases your energy throughout the day, so that you are less fatigued during the day and have better sleep at night.

Simply stated, the more fit you are, the better your performance is in bed.

Cardio exercise enhances key components of your immune system, which better enables you to fight off viral infections like colds and flu and even newly formed cancer cells.

Men may lose up to 20 percent of our vital lung capacity between ages 30 and 40, and by age 50, the loss is approximately 40 percent. Your lung function can foretell how long you will live, according to a significant Framingham Heart Study. Dr. Al Sears’ groundbreaking work proved that if you don’t challenge your lungs’ maximum power, you’ll lose lung power quicker, and prematurely age. Cardio training that involves short bursts of intense exertion followed by a rest period as well as longer endurance activities send a message to your lungs to expand. In time, your body adapts and increases its lung volume and power.

Aerobic exercise improves the interactions of your nervous system with your muscular system, which results in greater strength, coordination, and speed.