By Andrew Smith, Webmaster at UsanaInHealth.com

In my opinion, exercise is critical for anyone, regardless of personal goals and targets regarding health. Exercise is not just for athletes or individuals aiming to drop weight or gain muscle, it is essential for everyone. If you decide that you do not need to exercise because you look good as you are then it is likely that the inside of your body may tell a different story!

When I suggest physical activity I do not necessarily mean formal exercises in a gym or fitness club setting. I refer to any activity that gets you moving and gets you to push your body outside of its usual sedentary or relaxed state. This is a principle described as OVERLOAD. You overload a muscle when you encourage it to work harder than it normally would and this also applies to your heart muscle!

I am not going to bore you with all the reasons why you should exercise, but I am confident that you are reading this because you want to maintain or improve your health. Health and vitality begins with your ability and committment to use and improve your physical body.

I am sure that there will still be people reviewing this, thinking that they don’t have time to exercise, or don’t really believe that they need to, but this may be because a part of the brain is trying to sabotage their efforts to improve their health! This is the same part of the brain that tells you that your diet can wait until Monday, or that one more piece of chocolate wont make any difference! We all have coping mechanisms of some sort and look to justify choices we make, even though we know through standard logic that what we are saying to ourselves isn’t necessarily true! The trick is to learn to realise when you are making excuses and to learn to silence the voice of negativity! This is a hugely important part of making positive changes in any area of your life.

So let me just outline 3 areas to consider for your own personal fitness regime. You must include cardiovascular exercise (elevating your heart rate), muscular exercise (strengthening and toning your muscles) and flexibility exercises (improving your posture and range of motion around your joints). Each of these areas are very important and should be included in your exercise programme.

Cardiovascular Exercise

In this section I will be focusing on cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is necessary for a number of reasons: Firstly, it improves the efficiency of your heart and lungs and enables your body to uptake and pump larger quantities of oxygen. If your body is able to uptake and circulate more oxygen then you are less likely to get out of breath as easily. You will be able to sustain exercising for longer durations and your heart and lungs will generally be healthier. This is described as cardiovascular fitness.

If we overlook the obvious then there are other benefits to exercising at higher intensities. If we use a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is too easy and 10 is almost impossible then you should aim to exercise at a minimum of 7. At 7 it should be hard and you will sweat, but you should be able to sustain the intensity for at least 20 minutes. When you exercise at this intensity, changes begin to take place in your body. Your body lays down more mitochondria in the muscles and the mitochondria are responsible for absorbing oxygen. To cut a long story short, your body can only use fat in the presence of oxygen, so the higher your body’s ability to absorb oxygen, the greater your capacity to burn fat!

There is another school of thought that says you should exercise at a difficulty of 6 out of 10, as this is the ‘fat burning zone’. Let me just explain something: you DO NOT burn more fat working at a level of 6 out of 10 than you do at an intensity of 7 out of 10! PERIOD! However, if you cannot maintain at least 20 minutes at higher intensity then you should reduce your level of difficulty to achieve the duration. In my opinion this is the only time you should exercise at a lower intensity (other than warm ups and cool downs). Working at 6 out of 10 will NOT encourage your body to undergo change and become a fat burning machine!

That said, only work up to higher intensities as your health improves. You should be in this for the long haul, so don’t over do it in the first few days! Start with what you are capable of doing and aim to develop over time. Also, seek support from your GP if you have any health conditions or concerns.

In my next article, I will be detailing an approach for managing and improving your cardiovascular exercise and fitness. This will provide a workable guide for any individual who is ready to begin exercising TODAY, or who has been exercising and wishes to improve further.

Please note that when you exercise your body uses more oxygen and as a byproduct more free radicals are produced within your body. Free radicals are volatile molecules, which attack and damage healthy cells in a process called oxidation (or free-radical damage). It is widely believed that we must ensure that we take in sufficient quantities of antioxidants (i.e. vitamins) to neutralise free radicals and safeguard our bodies from degenerative diseases. If you would like to learn more about high quality, pharmaceutical grade nutritional supplements then please visit