Horizon on Exercise
Hi everyone – a great programme last night on Horizon. If you want the low down on what they discussed here it is!
If you want to improve your blood glucose tolerance (essential for avoiding Diabetes later in life) then HIT is for you (High Intensive Training). The presenter cycled for 20 seconds at high intensity (this isn’t a walk in the park – you have to really go for it so that you are feeling pretty exhausted after the 20 seconds) then rest for a short while before doing the next 20 seconds, rest again and then the final 20 seconds. And you need to do this 3 times per week. And that’s it!
Are you going to the gym but not seeing any apparent benefits in your cardiovascular fitness? You could be one of the population who are what they call non-responders. You are missing the genes to respond to exercise aerobically. Most of us will fit into a sliding scale between non-responders and super-responders. However, don’t think that this means that exercise isn’t for you. Au contraire! You may not see any great benefits externally but internally your visceral fat (the fat that accumulates around your organs that is REALLY bad for you) will diminish.
And finally are you an office worker? Do you spend a lot of your day sat down? Well get up! That chair is a stealth killer! We need to move more and move more quickly. It’s not good enough to sit all day and then think we can go to the gym to get our exercise. The body become sedentary and we start to fur up. So the advice? We must move at least once an hour and if you can stand in meetings, on buses and trains then that is much better for us. And when you walk walk as fast as you can – the body responds by speeding other processes up. This theory was called NEAT and is about engaging our thermogenic (heat) ability to boost our fitness and calorie consumption.
(On a side note something else I read recently said the same thing – we need to boost our thermogenic capabilities and another way of doing this is by exercising when it’s cold or just moving around somewhere that is a little cold – possibly a good reason for dropping the thermostat at home a little!).
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