Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [72]
CHEAT SHEET: EXERCISE AND AGING
• Starting in your mid-30s, you lose 1 to 2 percent of your muscle mass each year and about 9 percent of your aerobic fitness per decade—but regular exercise slows this decline dramatically.
• Long-term studies find that runners get osteoarthritis at a lower rate than non-runners, contradicting the common belief that running wears down your knees.
• Successful masters athletes train consistently without long breaks, focus their workouts on the most essential elements, and take extra recovery time to avoid injuries.
• Endurance declines more sharply than speed as you age. Steady training may prevent your rate of decline from accelerating.
• Declining motivation may be as important as aging bodies in explaining why older athletes slow down. Ensuring that your family and friends are supportive helps maintain positive social pressure.
• Aerobics-style exercise in water can reduce the impact on joints and lower the risk of falls. The exercise benefits are similar to dry land, though your heart rate will be lower due to water pressure.
• Activities that build muscle (like strength training) or provide jarring impacts (like running or basketball) are better for building strong bones than cycling, swimming, or elliptical training.
• Exercise slows down the cellular aging process in which the caps on the end of your DNA (known as telomeres) get shorter.
Chapter 9
Weight Management
THE “SECRET” TO EASY WEIGHT LOSS is well-known—so well-known, in fact, that everyone has one. It’s eating less fat . . . or fewer carbs. It’s exercising at low “fat-burning” intensity . . . or at maximum intensity. It’s consuming fewer calories . . . or burning more calories. It’s lifting weights . . . or doing cardio. The contradictions are endless, and the real message is that there’s no single tactic that makes losing weight easy for everyone.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about weight loss. On the contrary, researchers are teasing apart the complex links between diet, physical activity, hormones, and fat storage. Understanding how different types of exercise and eating patterns affect the body will help you plot a weight-loss strategy tailored to your needs and avoid common misconceptions like the myth of the “fat-burning” zone. More importantly, it’s now clear that being thin and being healthy aren’t always the same thing—so the success of your exercise regime should be measured by aerobic fitness, not the bathroom scale.
Is it possible to be fat and healthy at the same time?
Fat is bad and obesity is an epidemic—that’s the message we hear on a daily basis. That’s why the unexpected results of a 2009 study published in the journal Obesity created a mini-sensation. A team of Canadian and American researchers used data from Statistics Canada’s National Population Health Survey to follow 11,326 adults for 12 years. They found that subjects who were overweight (body mass index of 25 to 30) were 17 percent less likely to die during the study period than those of normal weight (BMI of 18.5 to 25).
Does this mean we’ve been wrong all along about the links between weight and health? That our mantra should be, as newspaper headlines put it, “Get fat, live longer”? In truth, the results weren’t surprising to obesity researchers, joining a growing pile of evidence that body weight is not the absolute indicator of health we once thought. But don’t quit the gym yet. It turns out that physical fitness is a far better barometer of your long-term health than weight is—and that holds true even for thin but inactive people who