Club Blog

Recent studies have shown that one of the best ways to stay fit is to take your pooch for a daily walk. Because you’re doing all that exercise for your dog, and not just for yourself, you stay committed to your fitness program long after other people have given up on their gym memberships or hidden their home exercise equipment in the garage.

You’ll keep on having fun for years, without spending a lot of money. All the equipment you need will cost less than a month at a gym. And the activity you’ll both be engaged in – walking – has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to get fit and stay fit.

If you don’t currently have a dog, and if you have a hard time forcing yourself out of the house because of chronic pain or depression, it may be time to “prescribe” yourself a canine walking partner. Many doctors around the country are discovering the healing power of pets.

In short, walking improves your fitness while your dog helps you stay with your program. Walking regularly also gives your dog the exercise he needs to stay healthy and happy.

Walking doesn’t just improve your fitness and health by burning off calories. Scientists have found that walking elevates your serotonin, a chemical in your brain. An increase in your serotonin puts you in a better mood, helps you sleep better, and controls your appetite.

In fact, walking can boost your serotonin levels by up to 47 percent, which could curb your appetite as much as 29 percent for six hours after you walk.

Exercising not only keeps the physical elements of your body healthy but it will also help to relieve any tension and depression that you have in your life, it works to improve physically and mentally. When you start to exercise it is important to make sure that you start slow and build the intensity if it up slowly. Exercise at a high rate too quickly can cause strain on not only your muscles and joints but also so your lungs and heart. Remember if you have any doubts or concerns about exercise make sure that you consult your doctor before exercising. Let’s have a look at a couple simple and effective ways of exercising.

Running/Jogging

Running and jogging is a great way to keep your body in shape, it is the most natural form of exercise and is impossible to do without raising your heart rate. One of the advantages of running over any other exercise is that you do not need anything to do it, you can choose when and where to run and all you have to do is just get outside and do it. Just to note here as with any exercises that it is important to warm up and warm down with stretchers. Running 3 times a week for about 20 minutes each will be a sure way to help keep your body in good working order and that your lungs and heart are staying healthy

Cycling

As with running when you cycle you want to make sure that it becomes an event by where you do it 2 or 3 times per week. There is no point cycling once here and once there every few week, that is not enough. If you are going to cycle you want to make sure that you do it regularly doing the week and cycle for about 3 to 6 miles depending on how good you are at it. If you are aiming for a time to cycle in I would say that you want to aim for about 20 to 30 minutes cycling hard and building up a slight sweat, don’t cycle too hard however this can cause illness or make you feel pain.

So which type is best for your diabetes and your overall health? Well, both types have their advantages. Cardiovascular training is more effective at stimulating the body to use blood sugar for energy but weight training has been linked with significant improvements in blood sugar control. My advice is to do a mixture of both cardiovascular training and resistance training as part of your regular exercise routine. This will allow you to gain the maximum benefit from each type of exercise which include:

1) IMPROVED BLOOD SUGAR CONTROL:- As mentioned above both types of exercise can help you control your blood sugar levels by prompting your body to burn more blood sugar. In fact in some cases of type 2 diabetes exercise has been so effective that it has removed the need for insulin injections.

2) IMPROVED RECEPTIVENESS TO INSULIN:- One of the key problems facing diabetics is a lack of insulin in the body. However, research suggests that regular exercise can improve the body’s sensitivity to insulin. Therefore, by exercising regularly diabetics can use the limited insulin they have available more effectively.

3) REDUCED BODY FAT LEVELS:- Both types of exercise can help you burn fat in different ways. Cardiovascular training stimulates fat burning directly (both during and after exercise) whereas building muscle mass through resistance training can slightly increase the number of calories you burn each day. Fat cells are more resistant to insulin than muscle cells and so by burning them off through exercise you can make your body more receptive to insulin.

It is aerobic exercises where there is the most debate as to which exercise is best to burn fat; low to moderate intense level or high intense level aerobics. With the low to moderate intense aerobic workouts your body uses approximately 60% of fat for fuel. However, the low to moderate level aerobics also burn fewer calories overall as compared to high impact aerobics.

The high impact aerobics will give you a higher calorie burn overall but only use about 35% of fat for fuel. Hence the reason for the debate and confusion as to which is the best fat burning exercise routine.

To best understand the difference between the two types of aerobics, let?s use an example. For instance, if a man weighing 175 pounds took a brisk walk at 4 mph for 30 minutes, a low to moderate level aerobic exercise, he would have burned approximately 158 calories. If 60% was fat, he would have burned about 95 fat calories.

Now if this same man jogged or ran for 30 minutes at 6 mph, a high impact aerobic exercise, he would have burned about 420 calories with 147 of these calories coming from fat; or 35% of total calories burned. So you can see he had the highest total calories and fat calories with the high impact aerobic workout.

Unfortunately not everyone is at a level in their exercise routines to be able to keep up this fast pace for this amount of time. So let?s assume that this man ran for only 20 minutes instead of the full 30 minutes. In this case he would only burn 280 calories total and 98 fat calories. Even with the shorter duration of the high impact aerobics he was able to burn more calories as well as a few more fat calories.

Again this is a high impact level and if you are not in a position to run at this pace for even a few minutes, then your best fat burning exercise will be a low to moderate level aerobics. To increase both the total calories burned and the fat calories try increasing the duration of your low to moderate aerobic workout.

Did you know that you can use a different type of cardio called interval training that can burn a lot of calories during the actual cardio workout and for hours afterwards as well?

When performed correctly, interval training is faster, more fun, and most importantly, has been shown in research to have a dramatic effect on your resting metabolism. What this means is that you might burn 350 calories during your cardio workout, then another 500 throughout the rest of the day!

Interval training is an excellent weight loss cardio workout option for this very reason. Interval training simply consists of using both high and low speeds and intensities at set points in your workout. It can be done on any cardio machine and can even be done walking outside!

If you are truly serious about achieving weight loss with a cardio workout, then learning more about interval training is an absolute must. Your will feel like you got twice the workout in half the time and have a lot more results to show for it!