Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while
movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.
—PLATO
Now I know what ‘Feel the burn’ means,” my forty-nine-year-old client Amanda ruefully told me several years ago, “because I’m feeling it in my knees every day!”
The lovely Amanda was yet another victim of the hard-pounding aerobics craze of the 1980s, where she happily sweated off her day’s stress in one step class after another. Like so many other high-impact-loving aerobicizers, she had unwittingly been setting herself up for premature (and often progressively severe) joint damage, particularly in the hips and knees, decades later.
So I became determined to create an exercise system that would first of all demand powerful concentration, so that you can think only about proper movement execution and proper posture alignment, powering up your brain with multitasking balance and coordination movements, but that would also give you brain-strengthening benefits—and heart- and lung-strengthening cardiovascular benefits, too.
Why We Need to Exercise
Why is exercise so important for a healthy brain and body? A landmark study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in February 1995, showed clear evidence linking even small to moderate amounts of physical activity—what the researchers said was the equivalent of brisk walking at three to four miles per hour for most healthy adults—to measurable health benefits. The intent of this study was to try to convince American adults to become more physically active.
This study proved that physically active adults, when compared with sedentary adults, were able to better protect themselves from the risk of several chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertension, osteoporosis, non-insulin-dependent diabetes, colon cancer, and anxiety and depression.
In addition, researchers found that “exercise training improves CHD risk factors and other health-related factors, including blood lipid profile, resting blood pressure in borderline hypertensives, body composition, glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity, bone density, immune function, and psychological function.” On the other hand, those who were sedentary had a higher death rate, with estimates that as many as 250,000 deaths per year in the United States were attributable to a lack of regular physical activity.
Exercise Is Good for Your Heart
Risk factors for heart diseases, including hardening of the arteries, include high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes, being 30 percent above your ideal weight, and/or a family history of heart attacks before age fifty-five in men and before age sixty-five in women. This is not information to ignore. According to the American Heart Association, over one-third of the adult population in the United States is at risk for cardiovascular disease, with over 409,000 men and over 454,000 women dying from it every year.
One of the indicators of optimal cardiovascular health is to have few if any signs of inflammation in your blood vessels. Ideally, you want your blood vessels to dilate easily, keeping inflammation to a minimum, so that you can have optimal blood flow to your brain, muscles, and all other tissues.
The more you exercise, the more you lessen your body’s inflammatory response. Plus, the better the oxygen intake in your tissues will be. This is extremely important, because when your tissues’ oxygen intake increases, your lungs are able to take in more oxygen and process it and send it to your cells more efficiently.
Furthermore, the more you exercise, the more nitric oxide your body produces. As a result, your blood vessels are less “sticky,” which is what attracts cholesterol deposits.
In addition, exercise strengthens not just your heart but the peripheral muscles as well, particularly as their ability to use oxygen improves. Your basic energy level increases as a result.
When my clients started doing their Super Body, Super Brain circuits, they’d be sweating right away, so I put heart-rate monitors on them to check their pulse. Their heart rates were up, but they never went higher than the target goal of a moderate, aerobic level. Simply by doing exercises combining balance and coordination, they were able to work an incredible amount of muscles at once, which required full-on cardiovascular activity.
Exercise Can Help Prevent Type 2 Diabetes
In the last few decades, the incidence of type 2 diabetes has been increasing at terrifying rates. According to the American Diabetes Association, nearly twenty-four million American adults and children have diabetes, but nearly one-quarter of them are as yet unaware of it. Even more shocking, nearly fifty-seven million people have prediabetes. What’s even more terrifying is that many cases of type 2 diabetes are wholly preventable.
Diabetes is caused by irregularities with insulin, the hormone secreted by your pancreas. Its function is to regulate the metabolism of sugar and starches and convert them into usable energy by the body. But when too much sugar is consumed—in the form of the simple carbohydrates (white bread, white sugar, pasta, juice, and so on) that are the primary sources of most calories for most people—insulin can’t properly regulate it, leading to spikes in blood sugar that prevent cells from working properly and serious complications including circulatory disorders and organ failure.
There are two types of diabetes: type 1, which is not preventable because it’s genetically triggered; and type 2, which is caused primarily by lifestyle and genetic predisposition. Few people who eat a nutritionally sound diet, have a normal weight, and exercise regularly develop type 2 diabetes. Those who are overweight and sedentary do.
instantly bring down your blood sugar
• Stand tall, both arms at your waist, holding either light hand weights or bottles comfortably in your hands.
• Do a biceps curl (see page) with your left arm while raising your right leg, and then repeat with the other arm and leg. This is one rep.
Reps: 50–100
I have been collaborating with one of the largest pension funds in America to help their members with diabetes learn how to incorporate Super Body, Super Brain into their daily routine. Diabetics are at grave risk for life-threatening complications with their circulation, leading to amputations, blindness, and death, so it is crucial for them to get up and move.
As you’ll see, exercising for short periods three times a day can be as effective as one longer workout. Frequent exercise may be particularly beneficial for diabetics, as was shown in a 2007 study done in Denmark and published in the journal Diabetologia. In this study, researchers concluded that breaking up the exercise sessions meant that the total energy expenditure was higher after three short workouts than after one longer workout, and that the higher energy expenditure helped subjects manage blood sugar more effectively.
Exercise Can Help Prevent Metabolic Syndrome
Metabolic syndrome is the name for a group of medical disorders that put you at higher risk for developing cardiovascular disease or diabetes. According to the American Heart Association, it has become increasingly common in the United States, with an estimated forty-seven million adults suffering from it. That’s because the criteria include having a large waist circumference (forty inches and up for men and thirty-five inches and up for women), high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other factors.
Exercise Can Help Lessen Bone Loss, Manage Arthritis, and Prevent Osteoporosis
Another great thing exercise does is make your bones more dense. Weight-bearing exercise like walking, dancing, tennis, low-impact aerobics, and, of course, Super Body, Super Brain is something everyone needs to add to their regular exercise routine if only to help lessen bone loss that is inevitable with age, particularly with postmenopausal women who no longer have the bone-protecting power of estrogen in their system. (Adding estrogen postmenopause with hormone-replacement therapy is no longer recommended because it is a risk factor for developing breast cancer.)
The catch is that this exercise has to be done regularly (three or four times each week for at least thirty to forty minutes) in order to maintain these benefits for your bones. Without constant use, muscle fibers atrophy; lower muscle volume is accompanied by a decrease in bone density. Weak bones become brittle and easier to fracture and are thus a huge fear among the elderly, because a simple fall can have catastrophic results for them. Strong bones and muscles, coupled with exercises that improve balance and coordination, provide extra insurance for all bodies as they grow older.
The right kind of exercise can also help with either osteoarthritis (caused by a breakdown of the cartilage in the joints) or rheumatoid arthritis (caused by inflammation of the lining of the joints). Workouts that are nonimpact and of moderate intensity, that increase your range of motion, and that build strong muscle around the joints to give them additional support are extremely beneficial.
The good news is that you can do something about these diseases by deciding to take care of yourself. One of the reasons I designed the Super Body, Super Brain exercise circuits to be so short is that anyone and everyone can find the time to do them, as you’ll see in the next section.
Save Your Joints
Anyone who spent any time exercising through the 1980s will have an indelible memory of a sleek and svelte Jane Fonda in her striped leotard, exhorting her aerobics students to “feel the burn.”
Feel the burn they did—until they burned out.
As reported by David Sheff in the New York Times on February 8, 2007, in the article “Whatever Happened to Jane Fonda in Tights?” a spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association said that from a peak of seventeen to twenty million happy aerobicizers in the 1980s, the numbers fell tremendously to under five million in 2005 and are continuing to drop. The reason is simple: injuries from all that repetitive pounding, especially to the joints of the legs, took many years to show up, but when they did, the results were dire: knees needed to be replaced.
We all know that the more you move, the more calories you burn. But the more you move, the more you can stress your joints, particularly your knees and ankles, and particularly if you are overweight. For example, if you weigh 130 pounds and go out for a nice long run, take a step class, or play basketball, every time you take a step, 130 pounds is shifted onto one leg and then the other. If you weigh 230 pounds, all that weight will be shifted from one side to the other with more impacting results. If your muscles are not strong and conditioned to take the impact, your joints will be more exposed to injury.
But if exercise has such a positive impact on our brains, why shouldn’t we engage in sports as much as we possibly can? Well, the most important reason is that doing any kind of regular sport requires joint impact and sustained rotations, which often leads to injuries much more quickly than if you were doing slow, controlled, varied movements. In addition, doing any sport involves skill, and not everyone has the skills necessary for the sport they might be interested in. Plus, certain sports are not aerobic, so they don’t up your heart rate or burn very many calories or fat. You need only look at weekend golfers to understand that although playing golf may be enjoyable, it is not high on anyone’s weight-loss list!
A far more effective way to increase your heart rate and burn calories without putting that extra weight on your joints is by doing balance and coordination exercises with combined strength training—the essence of the Super Body, Super Brain program.
Weekend warriors who exercise on an irregular basis often don’t realize how much intense training, with nonimpact exercises, professional athletes do in the off-season to help prevent injuries all year round. As a result, weekend warriors often get injured after doing high-impact cardio because they haven’t balanced out their routines with other exercises that strengthen tendons, ligaments, and muscles.
This doesn’t mean you need to give up the cardio exercise you love and that likely helps you manage your stress. If you are close to your ideal body weight, have developed a strong core, and have added elements of balance and coordination to your routine, your body will be stronger and better able to absorb some of the impact. What I do is combine my daily Super Body, Super Brain circuits with several days of cardio, including the basketball games that I love with a passion. A similar schedule would likely work for you, too.
rebecca’s story
Working Out at Medium Intensity Is the Way to Go
Typically, we’re told that we must exercise at least three to five times each week, for at least thirty to sixty minutes per session, in order to see any physical or health results. But one of the worst mistakes people make when they want fast changes is to increase their cardio, doing some form of high-impact, high-intensity exercise over a sustained period, such as running on a treadmill or taking an aerobics class for an hour, coupled with an intense weight-lifting regime, all while drastically cutting calories. Of course there are benefits to training at a high intensity, particularly to strengthen your heart and muscles. But for the average exerciser, not only can high intensity cause injuries—it can cause burnout. If you give up exercising in frustration because you can’t sustain a tough level of workouts, then it’s no good to you at all.
And on the other end of the exercising spectrum is a colleague at the investment bank where I used to work. He was fond of telling me that he just didn’t have time to exercise for an hour—so why bother at all?
The latest research shows that breaking up the workout sessions may have the same cardiovascular and pulmonary result, or one that’s even better.
According to a Stanford University research study, three ten-minute workout sessions (morning, lunch, and evening) produced the same benefit as one solid thirty-minute workout. The benefits of increased peak oxygen uptake—weight loss and a lowering of the heart rate—were virtually the same in both test groups. The reason three ten-minute workout sessions might improve your benefit is that in the one-time-per-day group, there was only one cooldown—the period during which the heart rate stays elevated for a half hour after exercise. Which means that if you exercise three times a day, you have three cooldowns and thus three periods of guaranteed elevated heart rate.
The key, as with so many other things in life, is moderation. Sure, it’s nice to have meandering walks with a friend (easy, slow workout) or to challenge yourself and run until you’re dripping with sweat on the treadmill (hard, fast workout). But the most efficient, effective way to burn the fat stored in your body is by training at a medium intensity level while you’re multitasking and confusing your muscles, working your brain and your sensory system at the same time. During this kind of workout, you will deplete your fat stores before you’ve depleted your muscle tissue, which can happen for those who train at high intensity for long periods without sufficient calorie consumption.
And because exercising at medium intensity gives you proven health benefits, you can change the exercise from good to great by doing strength training with hand weights while staying in constant motion. This will not only help your heart and lungs but make you leaner and stronger. The best way to ensure a medium-level workout is through strength training and circuit training, which extensive research has shown to be extremely effective at reducing body fat while increasing lean muscle mass.
When you do the Super Body, Super Brain circuits, you will be working out at a medium intensity while engaging dozens of muscles at the same time—still reaping the rewards of maximum power in a compressed time period without overtaxing your body. It’s quality time, not quantity time!
Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Exercise
There are two kinds of exercise: aerobic (bringing in oxygen) and anaerobic (giving out oxygen). Both have their benefits, which is why athletes do varied workouts incorporating different elements for maximum results. Aerobic exercise is done at a moderate rate, and with the presence of oxygen. The Super Body, Super Brain exercises can get you up to your target zone in less than a minute. Then you’ll have time to catch your breath and get your strength back for the next sequence.
The easiest way to figure out for yourself whether you’re training aerobically is to determine whether you’d be just about able to maintain a conversation while exercising. This is because when you’re training aerobically, your body has enough time to process the oxygen from outside, inhaling it into your lungs and spreading it throughout your entire body. The more oxygen you bring in, the more efficiently your heart and lungs work in sync. This strengthens the sides of your heart, leading to a slower and more efficient resting heart rate. In addition, working out at this level is close to the frontier separating aerobic and anaerobic, where your heart rate is at 65 to 75 percent of its maximum level. This is the stage at which you are most likely to have that lovely endorphin release, giving you a runner’s high.
My target heart rate = 137–165.
Ten Minutes of Exercise Three Times a Day Can Be as Effective as Exercising for Thirty Minutes at One Time
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its sedentary-lifestyle death rates back in 1995, those were shocking figures. What’s even more shocking, though, is that obesity rates have skyrocketed since that study was released. One of the primary reasons was that, according to the CDC, over 60 percent of American adults were not regularly active, and 25 percent were not active at all. Why is that? Because most people erroneously believe that “to reap health benefits they must engage in vigorous, continuous exercise.” The CDC’s recommendation was that all adult Americans should work out for at least thirty minutes, doing some form of moderate-intensity physical activity, nearly every day—and preferably every day.
Even more important for the Super Body, Super Brain program, these recommendations not only encouraged everyone to reap the benefits of moderate-intensity physical activity, but showed how intermittent activity, breaking up the recommended thirty minutes of activity into short bouts, was also extremely beneficial as long as it was done with the same intensity you’d have as when you’d take a brisk exercise walk.
“These unique elements of the recommendation are based on mounting evidence indicating that the health benefits of physical activity are linked principally to the total amount of physical activity performed,” the CDC study claimed. “This evidence suggests that amount of activity is more important than the specific manner in which the activity is performed (i.e., mode, intensity, or duration of the activity bouts).”
The importance of this study cannot be underestimated, because it clearly proved that you don’t need to go to a gym and do a hard hour of cardio exercise every day in order to improve your health.
Even better, you won’t just help your heart—you’ll be triggering the release of the good neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, so you’ll feel good three times more often. This can be particularly beneficial for anyone dealing with a lot of stress.
“I think that breaking up your exercise sessions is a brilliant idea also for stress management, blood circulation, and sleep management,” Dr. Nelly Szlachter, a gynecologist who treats many women who have menopause-related problems, told me.
“Moreover,” the CDC study added, “for people who are unable to set aside 30 minutes for physical activity, shorter episodes are clearly better than none.”
In other words, exercise that raises your heart rate and trains you aerobically is good for you.
Furthermore, most of the cardiovascular scientific data indicates that what counts is not the intensity of the workout but its regularity or consistency over time. You want to aim for at least sixty to one hundred minutes each week, which is as little as ten minutes six times a week for beginners, gradually increasing to one hundred minutes each week once you’re accustomed to exercising.
Dr. Brad Radwaner, a cardiologist and founder of the New York Center for Heart Prevention and Disease, also suggests that those who are significantly overweight (with a body mass index, or BMI, over 25) or obese (BMI over 30) need more time to exercise, either per week or per session, with a minimum of twenty minutes three times a week. Those looking to lose twenty to fifty pounds should exercise at least four or five times each week.
Gradually incorporating physical activity into your daily routine can benefit anyone who’s gotten approval from their doctor to do so. One study by the Cooper Institute in Dallas, undertaken from 2001 to 2006 involved 464 women who were sedentary, postmenopausal, and overweight or obese. Not surprisingly, all women who added movement to their lives saw improvement, even those who moved the least. They felt better and had more energy.
The potential that we all have is incredible. However, to reach that potential, we need to be consistent, disciplined, and hungry to achieve the myriad benefits. You hold this power. It is up to you.