Fitness and Exercise

When it comes to your health or losing weight, Exercise is as important as Healthy Eating. Both are needed to achieve good health and body size.

Exercise can be divided into two main categories, Aerobic (Cardiovascular) and Anaerobic (Resistance or Strength training). Both play a role in good health, and especially if your trying to lose excess fat. Aerobic is for endurance activities like running, biking, aerobics, etc. Anaerobic is for strength training, gymnastics, sprinting, etc. Some exercises or sports like climbing, soccer, etc work both.

There are two main muscle types in the body. Slow twitch (type 1) and Fast twitch (type 2). Aerobic or endurance exercise mainly works the slow twitch muscles and anaerobic or strength and speed activities work the fast twitch muscles. Many of us have about 50-50 of each muscle, but our genetic makeup gives some of us more of one than the other. this is why you may feel you very good at endurance or maybe strength or speed activities.

Exercising both slow twitch muscles and fast twitch muscles is very important for fat loss. If we only do one we are missing half the benefit. Both have been researched and found to play an important role in health and fat loss. Anytime you increase muscle you burn energy and increase your metabolism because you have more muscle mass that needs energy to maintain. Strength training has been shown to be as beneficial as aerobic exercise in helping people to lose excess fat (remember that muscle is the bodies most metabolically active tissue).