Exercise is important for our health and fitness; it helps our body to function more efficiently by improving muscle balance, cardiovascular efficiency power, flexibility, tone, speed and endurance. Achieving these benefits however, depends on how we apply exercise principles, which is how we make the exercises count.
APPLICATION AND FUNCTION
Quite often exercises are performed in a generic manner; persons try to achieve a specific fitness goal without applying the correct formula, this approach often end in futility and frustration and sometimes cause cessation of exercise. For exercise to be effective it must be functional, for it to be functional the application must be compatible with the objective.
To emphasis this point, I will refer to the popular concept ‘Walking is good exercise to lose fat’. Walking is highly recommended as good exercise for the purpose of losing or reducing body fat, it’s a popular maxim that may not be consistent with principals of body fat loss. Walking is a good exercise for health and well being, it activates several muscles, improves mental health, relieve stress but it does a poor job in reducing subcutaneous body fat.
It does not deliver enough metabolic stimuli to get fat burning hormones working.
To lose body fat your exercise must burn calories consistently by increasing your metabolism, yes walking burns fat but because it’s a low intensity activity, the total amount of calories burned is very low so the amount of fat burn is minimal. To be effective you need to significantly increase V02Max (the maximum amount of oxygen the body can uptake during exercise) which measures your overall ability to burn fat, the higher the uptake the more calories burns.
A more effective way to burn fat is through moderate to high intensity short duration
(15-20mins) exercises which incorporates resistance, this form of exercise include cross and interval training which increases calorie expenditure and metabolism but also enable muscle hypertrophy which facilitate fat burning more effectively than walking. High intensity exercise also keep your fat burning hormones fired up for up to 24 – 48 hours.
Yes, walking exercise is good for you; it is relaxing and has life-extending benefits. However, if the goal is to reduce unsightly subcutaneous body fat then a more intense form of exercising is best, it’s all about application, make exercise count.