ME… Intelligent Exercise:

Intelligence refers to the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. In the fitness industry, knowledge acquired about the optimal way to achieve fitness is not being applied, until now. Metabolic effect training uses the latest research in the fields of weight loss and exercise and applies them in a convenient individually tailored way.

For years exercise research focused on what happened during exercise and ignored the after effects. Now we know what goes on during exercise directly impacts whether the body burns or stores fuel. In fact, the after effects of exercise may be the most important aspects determining fitness and body composition.

The amount of oxygen you burn is directly related to how much fat you burn. In other words, fat, like fire needs oxygen to burn. This fact led early researchers to conclude that the lower the exercise intensity the more fat you burn. The rationale was that as exercise intensity increased the body could not supply enough oxygen for fat burning and therefore switches to burning sugar, a fuel that can be burned without oxygen. The higher the intensity of exercise the more sugar burned and the less fat.

In reality this is true, but only from a relative perspective. The body does burn a higher percentage of sugar than fat during intense exercise. However, high intensity, oxygen deprived exercise burns more fat overall than oxygen adequate exercise. This example will explain. Two people exercise for 30minutes. One person exercises at a low intensity and burns 100 calories with 70% of these calories coming from fat and 30% coming from sugar. That means person 1 burned 70 calories of fat and 30 calories of sugar. Person 2 exercises at a higher intensity and burns 200 calories from the increased energy expenditure. Due to the decreased ability to provide the body with oxygen 50% of the calories burned by person 2 are from fat and 50% are from sugar leading to a grand total of 100 calories of fat burned and 100 calories of sugar burned. Who burned the most fat? Person 2. This demonstrates that high intensity exercise burns more fat and more total calories than its low intensity counterpart. Intelligent exercise is high intensity for this reason.

Intelligent exercise also takes advantage of the “oxygen catch up” created by high intensity exercise. Researchers call this phenomenon excess post exercise oxygen consumption or EPOC. A more telling name for this effect is oxygen debt. Have you ever walked up a large flight of stairs? What happens when you reach the top? You breathe much harder after reaching the top then you do while you are actually walking….dont you? This is a micro-example of oxygen debt created by exercise. It is as if your body says, “hey, I could not get all the oxygen I needed to do that activity; I better take some time and recover my losses. Guess what happens when you create this effect during exercise? The same thing. After doing correct exercise, your heart and lungs have to work a little harder all day to repair and replace the oxygen and other materials used during activity. Since increased oxygen consumption means increased energy usage in the form of fat, you burn fat at an accelerated rate all day.

In addition to vigorous exercise, there are other exercise techniques that can amplify this effect even further. Exercise done quickly with minimal rests, using weight lifting exercises done one after the other, and all out exercise alternated with periods of lower exercises are all smart ways to amplify these effects. Studies have shown exercise using one or more of these techniques can create an increased metabolism for 16-48 hours; hence the METABOLIC EFFECT. Generating an effect such as this involves smart directed activity done in a manner that takes into account individual patterns of exercise tolerance.