Most of you reading this article are indoctrinated in the philosophy
that regular cardiovascular conditioning is important for your health
and that such training reduces your risk of heart attack. If you do
agree with this premise, you are also very likely to believe that to
achieve cardiovascular conditioning, you must regularly perform
cardiovascular exercises, such as running and biking or using a
cardiovascular machine. But is this the case?
First, let’s look at the issue from a perspective of natural
history. Our evolution into the human species from our ape ancestors is
thought to have occurred some 2.8 million years ago. Spanning the
duration of this vast period, it should strike you as interesting that
the first reported heart attack in the U.S. occurred in 1920, only 12
years after the grain industry began hydrogenating plant and grain
oils. Now, I personally find it interesting that there is such hype
over cardiovascular exercise as necessary prevention for heart attack
or even heart disease, when such diseases were relatively nonexistent
less than 100 years ago. That’s but a flash in the pan of human
evolution. Our next logical question should be, did our
ancestors regularly participate in cardiovascular exercise? Not likely.
First of all, it would not be energy efficient to run around gathering
berries, firewood and nuts in your target zone. Nor would it have been
wise to run through the bush trying to get a workout while hunting,
since any animal would hear you coming from hundreds of yards away and
be long gone by the time you got there. If there was a cardiovascular
stressor in our native environment, it was most likely when we had to
send a messenger to a neighboring village or during times of battle,
when you were either running or fighting for your life.
When
you look at most sports played today, recreational activities, and work
related tasks, the great majority of them place anaerobic demands on
the body. Now, surely some of you grew up on a farm or have done hard
labor before. When performing any intense work, you begin breathing
faster and faster…in fact, you will go aerobic within a few minutes if
the work efforts demand so much of your anaerobic energy systems that
the demand for energy can’t be replaced by intermediate and anaerobic
energy systems (fast glycolytic and aerobic).
I have many
memories of bucking hay; the bails weigh 75-120 lb., yet you’ve got to
keep up with the tractor as it moves through the field (no, my dad
didn’t let me stop for a minute every 12 bails).
When you have
thousands of bails to haul in, and will be in the field for hours at a
time, you will soon find that your anaerobic stimulus (the bails)
produces a demand that the purely anaerobic phosphagen system can’t
maintain on it’s own (it only lasts about 8-12 seconds), resulting in
ATP production by anaerobic glycolysis and aerobic metabolism
respectively. By this very mechanism, our anaerobic capacity is
recharged during sports such as tennis, soccer, hockey, basketball,
etc., that require explosive movement for prolonged periods of time.
I
use hay-bucking because it is a real-world example of how we have
maintained aerobic fitness from the beginning of human evolution. If
you can follow my logic here, you should be wondering why we are so
encouraged to offer aerobic exercise to our patients and clients by
most every medical, physical therapy, chiropractic and personal
training education program that exists. It’s simple actually. It’s the
very same reason we are being told that we must eat a high carbohydrate
diet for energy…why doctors tell people they must take this or that
drug…BIG INDUSTRY INFLUENCE.
Quite simply, there’s not much
money in the manufacture and sales of dumbbells, weight plates and
Olympic bars, but there are huge amounts of money to be made if you can
convince the masses that aerobic exercise is necessary for disease
prevention. After all, have you priced a treadmill, step mill, spin
bike, rowing machine, elliptical machine or any such equipment lately?
They cost anywhere from several hundred, to several thousand dollars
per unit! They often have hundreds of moving parts, which wear out,
break and need to be replaced. How many Olympic bars or dumbbells have
you replaced lately? It is not at all unusual for a gym or rehab clinic
to spend $75,000-$100,000 on cardio equipment alone, and, they will
need to be replaced every few years; the same facilities often don’t
spend more than $15,000-$20,000 on free weight training equipment and
it can last the life of the gym. Yes, I know they spend large sums of
money on fixed axis resistance training machines, but that is but
another sign of industry influence and professional passivity!
When
you get several large equipment manufacturers with multi-million dollar
investments in the production of aerobic exercise equipment, you can
rest assured there will be a comparatively large commitment to creating
an aerobic exercise consciousness. The proof is all around you, in your
exercise and bodybuilding magazines, trade journals, on TV
infomercials, in your training manuals from most educational
institutions. Who do you think sponsors the educational institutions
and pays for the supportive research?
So Who Needs It?
The
issue is not one of prevention of cardiovascular disease by aerobic
exercise, it is an issue of getting the right kind of exercise to
benefit both your physiology and meet the demands of your work and
sports environment. For example, aerobic conditioning is not
general. If it were, any world-class marathon runner could jump on a
bike and win the Tour De France, or even the Hawaii Iron Man! Strength
training is also not general; there is a very finite amount
of carryover from one lift or movement pattern to the other. Otherwise,
the best squatter would be the best dead lifter too.
Everyone
needs to build fitness, yet for fitness (aerobic or anaerobic) to last,
it must be built upon foundation health principles. Proof of this
premise can be seen when world-class marathon runners (Jim Fix) and
champion bodybuilders (Lou Barry, a former Mr. Australia) die of a
heart attack at an early age. When we eat correctly for our metabolic
type, eat high quality organic foods, eat regularly to maintain our
blood sugar levels in an optimal range, get to bed at a reasonable hour
and learn to manage our stressors, the addition of an exercise program
of any type becomes truly therapeutic and offers disease prevention.
Aerobic fitness atop the standard American diet (SAD!) of
Carbohydrates, Refined sugar, Additives and Preservatives (CRAP!) will not
offer resistance to disease. In fact, it may well bring it on! Why?
That’s simple…because exercise is a stress and if you add more stress
to an already stressed system, it will crash.
You may think
this is simple, logical, straightforward stuff, but it isn’t, because
again, there is BIG money involved here. I will site one of hundreds,
even thousands of examples; Scripps Hospital here in San Diego recently
partnered with McDonalds. So now McDonalds feeds all those sick and
dying people in the hospital their SAD CRAP, while they pedal away on
bikes, pump pedals on stair masters, and about every other expensive
aerobic machine you can imagine!
Functional Aerobic Fitness
I suggest you study the foundation principles presented in my new book How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! and listen to the informative audio CD’s in my program titled You Are What You Eat.
While you are in the process of vitalizing your body from the inside
out, I recommend that you choose movement patterns that offer injury
prevention and improved performance in the environment where you work
and play.
While exercising, all you need do is wear a heart rate
monitor and determine your target heart rate zone. If you want a
greater aerobic stimulus than your work or training environment is
currently providing, simply shorten your rest periods. In short order,
you will progressively get a greater aerobic response to the stress
impinging upon the system via the activity you have chosen. If your
heart rate begins to rise too high, simply take a little longer rest
period or decrease the number of repetitions you are performing or the
amount of time under load.
If you follow this simple guideline,
you will learn to “eat, move and be healthy!” and, you will have the
greatest form of prevention of heart disease you could ever have, HEALTH!
From Paul Chek
http://www.chekinstitute.com/articles.cfm