All of the current research shows incredible and life-changing results can come from only 30-minutes of movement per day.
Imagine how much more you’d get out of increasing that with healthy eating and an even more active lifestyle!
Take 9-minutes and nineteen seconds to watch this entertaining and informative video from Doctor Mike Evans, then ask yourself if you can limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23.5 hours a day?
I was riding my bike home from the bank the other day, and had to speed up to pass a UPS truck before the car behind me got there. Of course, this quick extra effort caused my legs to flood with lactic-acid and burn a bit. This feeling is so common to me that I’m seldom aware of it, but right at that moment I began thinking of a friend who has wanted to start exercising for at least the past ten years but has never made it past the first one or two workouts.
The reason is always the same; starting a workout program after years or even months of inactivity invariably results in some serious and very unfamiliar discomfort and often a little pain. When the most effort you exert is the occasional run for the bus or that hike you were fooled into taking, the mind equates exercise with a phenomenal effort and the resulting pain & struggle. I believe part of the the key for breaking this barrier is understanding the exact reason why your muscles burn and how, with a little bit of stick-to-it-ness, you can get past it and on to a higher quality of life, and maybe even a much longer one!
The ‘burn’ you feel in your muscles during exercise, especially at the very start, and any time the intensity is raised (eg going up a hill) is caused by the acidity from the accumulation of Lactic Acid. You see, during these periods of your workout, the body’s supply of oxygen outstrips the demand and there is not enough of it to be converted into energy. The Lactic Acid is an essential product of the chemical process within your muscles that provides energy in the absence of oxygen. The excess Lactic Acid is cleared from your muscles within seconds of stopping the exercise, or when you reach a steady state again (eg flat section of the road).
The great part is, the more you exercise and the fitter you get, the better your body gets at buffering the Lactic Acid and thus the pain lasts for less time. Of course, you will also eventually end up working out harder and having the same level of burn (with increased performance!) but you’ll understand what it is by then, and knowing it goes away quickly, push through to new levels of fitness!
Stay tuned, my next post will explain why your muscles hurt one or two days AFTER exercise and what you can do to ease the soreness and keep getting fitter and stronger!