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[fish462]

The Aerobics Craze - a Monumental Mistake
By Al Sears, MD

Back in the 1970s - while studying at the University of South Florida - I made a curious discovery when running a series of tests on the gymnastics team.
I had picked out the gymnasts with low pulmonary function (lung capacity). The goal was to improve their performance by increasing their lung volume - and everyone believed that sustained running at an "aerobic level" would do that for them. But their next round of scores was even lower.
This triggered a wave of revelations that laid the foundation for my PACE® exercise system. Thirty years and dozens of clinical studies later, I can tell you this: The aerobics craze has been a monumental mistake.
Doing aerobics isn't a smart way to exercise, and it doesn't build your lungs or breathing capacity as the name implies. In fact, aerobics actually shrinks your heart and lungs - making you more vulnerable to fatal heart attacks.
If you exercise only within your current aerobic limits, you do so without improving your aerobic capacity. In other words, you never push hard enough to stop to catch your breath.
This kind of aerobic exercise trains your body for endurance and efficiency. And that sounds great, right? Well, it may sound great, but it's not. Because this kind of exercise causes "shrinkage" - smaller muscles, smaller heart, and smaller lungs. What's worse, it wipes out your lungs' reserve capacity.
Reserve capacity is what your lungs use to deal with a sudden increase in stress or high exertion (like lifting, carrying, running, or climbing stairs). Injuries or physical trauma, a shocking emotional blow, a particularly intense session in the bedroom with your partner - these all demand reserve energy. Without reserve capacity, you're much more likely to drop dead from a heart attack when faced with one of these situations.
It's normal to lose lung capacity as you age. By the time you're 70, you'll lose about 50 percent of it. But if you practice aerobics, you're going to make that loss even worse.
You don't hear much about this in the media, but the damage caused by lost lung capacity is far worse than you might imagine.
In the 1980s, a pioneering doctor named Ward Dean did extensive research on lung capacity. He discovered some remarkable statistics from the Framingham Heart Study. (If you're not familiar with it, the Framingham study has been running for over 50 years. It has no interference from drug companies, and is the most reliable source of data relating to heart health.)
Ironically, one of the study's most startling discoveries had nothing to do with the heart. It found that lung capacity is the best predictor of longevity - hands down. Simply stated, the bigger your lungs, the longer you live.
This is why reserve capacity is so critical - and why I'm so concerned about the popularity of aerobics. Aerobic exercise actually takes years off your life.
But a different kind of exercise builds reserve capacity ... and it gives you many other health benefits.
I call this kind of exercise supra-aerobics. It is the key to higher lung capacity, good muscle tone, high energy, and a strong heart. Plus, it takes a fraction of the time to achieve much better results.
Think of your lungs as a car engine. Traditional aerobics trades power for a smaller engine. Sure, a smaller engine is fuel-efficient. But fuel efficiency is not the best goal for your body in our modern world. And God help you if you need to quickly get out of the way of an oncoming truck. You just don't have the power.
Supra-aerobics, on the other hand, gives your heart and lungs a turbo boost that can get you out of a jam.
Other researchers are corroborating my findings: A Harvard study revealed that participants who used supra-aerobic principles in their workouts reduced their risk of heart disease by 100 percent more than those who practiced ordinary aerobic exercise. And a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that men and women who exercised with supra-aerobic methods had:
• Lower blood pressure
• Lower triglycerides (blood fat)
• Higher HDL (good cholesterol)
• Less body fat
But to get these results, you have to exercise beyond your current aerobic capacity and cross your aerobic threshold.
Aerobic means "with oxygen." Your aerobic metabolism combines oxygen with carbs, fats, and proteins to make energy. Because walking is not a strenuous activity, when you walk you have plenty of oxygen available to make the energy required. This is why you can walk for hours.
You can also sustain jogging with aerobic metabolism.
But let's say you start sprinting. You can't sustain that high output of energy with oxygen alone, so your anaerobic system kicks in. (This is known as crossing your aerobic threshold.)
Anaerobic means "without oxygen." The anaerobic system converts carbs - and some fats - into energy without using oxygen. When you're using your anaerobic system, you are training your high-energy output system. You're successfully building up reserve capacity in your heart, expanding your lung volume, triggering the production of growth hormone, and melting away fat.
When you exceed a rate you can sustain with oxygen and start using both your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems ... this is when you've crossed over into your supra-aerobic zone.
Remember ... aerobic exercise is low to medium output held for an extended period. Supra-aerobic exercise is high output, but short in duration.
To move your workout into the anaerobic range, you have to create an "oxygen debt" by asking your lungs for more oxygen than they can supply at that moment. You do that by exercising at a pace you can't sustain for more than a short period.
For instance, pedal a bike as fast as you can for 15 seconds. When you stop, you'll be panting - the sign that you've created an oxygen debt in your body. You can't sustain this kind of high-output challenge for very long. You have reached the supra-aerobic zone. This is very different from doing an aerobic workout for 45 minutes.
In a matter of weeks, you can:
• Lose pounds of belly fat
• Build functional new muscle
• Reverse heart disease
• Build energy reserves that will be available on demand
• Strengthen your immune system
• Reverse many of the changes of aging
By making small changes in your workouts, you can achieve remarkable results with supra-aerobics. And it takes only 12 minutes a day.


Two Fitness Disasters That Are Threatening Your Health
By Al Sears, MD

Finally, The New York Times has turned critical of cardiovascular endurance exercise and aerobics, the two big fitness trends of the last three decades. But they’re still missing the big picture. Cardio will not protect your heart, and aerobics makes your lungs shrink. These are not your best exercise strategies to get lean, and both accelerate several negative consequences of aging and cause other health problems.
"Whatever Happened to Jane Fonda in Tights?" was the title of one of two critical articles that recently ran in the Times. But instead of revealing the real problem with aerobics, it focused on aerobics instructors who developed joint injuries from too much jumping around.
Though overuse injuries are a common side effect of aerobic workouts, the real problem with aerobics is that it’s designed to keep you in your "aerobic zone." And if you want to keep fat off without starving and extend your "healthspan" (the number of years you can remain active, vigorous, and self-reliant) by pumping up your heart and lungs, you have to exercise beyond your current aerobic capacity.
Move Beyond Aerobics and Train Your "High-Energy Output System"
Aerobic means "with oxygen." So your aerobic metabolism combines oxygen with carbohydrate or fat to make energy. Because walking is not a strenuous activity, you have plenty of oxygen available to make enough energy to do it. That is why you could walk for hours.
But let’s say you start sprinting. You can’t sustain that high output of energy with oxygen alone. So that’s the point at which your anaerobic system kicks in. When you’re using both aerobic and anaerobic energy production, you’re training your high-energy output system. This is also known as "crossing your aerobic threshold."
By exercising in your supra-aerobic zone and building your high-energy output system, you build your lung volume. When you push yourself to the point of needing to stop and pant, you’ve asked your lungs for more oxygen than they’re able to provide at that moment. That triggers your body to increase your lung volume to be better prepared for the next time it encounters that same challenge.
As I told you in my ETR article "The Aerobics Craze - a Monumental Mistake," lung capacity is the best predictor of longevity - hands down. Simply stated, the bigger your lungs, the longer you live. Yet, unless we do something to prevent it, we all lose lung volume with age. By the time you’re 70, you’ve lost about 50 percent of your lung capacity.
That is why training your high-energy output system and signaling your body to build lung capacity is so critical. If all you do is aerobic exercise, you’ll make that loss even worse. At the end of the day, you’ll have two forces working against you: time and aerobic training.
For a Strong Heart, Heed This Lesson
Aerobics is not the only fitness disaster threatening your health. Duration cardio like jogging and treadmill workouts are probably worse.
There’s finally a body of clinical evidence to support what I’ve been telling my patients for two decades. Long-distance workouts - especially marathons - traumatize your heart and mimic the effects of heart disease. The New York Times took a step toward exposing this problem with an article called "Is Marathoning Too Much of a Good Thing for Your Heart?" But, as they did with their article on aerobics, they missed the big picture.
I began to investigate the dangers of durational workouts 20 years ago. During a marathon race where I was working at an emergency aid station, I saw two runners drop to their knees in cardiac distress.
In 2006 alone, at least six runners lost their lives in marathons in the U.S. In March, two police officers, one 53 years old and the other 60, died of heart attacks at the Los Angeles Marathon. Three runners in their early 40s all had fatal heart attacks during marathons in Chicago, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities. And at the October Marine Corps Marathon, a 56-year-old man collapsed at the 17-mile marker, never to recover.
We’re Finally Catching On to the Problem With Marathon Running
Dr. Arthur Siegel, director of internal medicine at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard University, has authored more than two dozen studies on runners of the Boston marathon.
For one of those studies, published in October 2001 in the American Journal of Cardiology, he drew blood samples from 80 middle-aged male runners - one sample just before, one sample immediately following, and a third sample the day after the marathon. The results: Twenty-four hours after the race, the men - none of whom had any history of heart disease - exhibited early-stage signs of cardiac damage similar to the symptoms that appear during a heart attack.
In a more recent study, published in the November issue of Circulation, Dr. Siegel and his colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital tested 60 runners (41 men and 19 women) before and after the 2004 and 2005 Boston Marathons. Each runner had a cardiogram to look for abnormalities in heart rhythm. They were also checked for evidence of cardiac problems in their blood. Troponin, a protein found in cardiac muscle cells, was used as a marker of cardiac damage. If the heart is traumatized, troponin shows up in the blood. Its presence is also used to determine whether heart damage was sustained during a heart attack.
The runners had normal cardiac function before the marathon, with no signs of troponin in their blood. Twenty minutes after finishing, 60 percent of the group had elevated troponin levels and 40 percent had levels high enough to indicate the destruction of heart muscle cells. In addition, most had noticeable changes in heart rhythm.
Dr. Siegel said, "Their hearts appeared to have been stunned." Bingo! During long-duration exercise, your heart is under constant stress with no time to recover. If it goes on long enough, your heart is traumatized and your body reacts by triggering a wave of inflammation.
Inflammation is a natural response by your body to initiate repairs. But if you trigger it recurrently and purposely as a result of exercise, you induce chronic inflammation of your heart and blood vessels - putting you on the fast track to heart disease. In fact, in The Doctor’s Heart Cure, I showed that inflammation, NOT cholesterol, is actually the leading mechanism of heart disease.
Dr. Siegel concluded that running a marathon causes injury to the skeletal muscles, which, in his words, "sets off a cascade of inflammation in the body."
In a related study at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, men who had completed at least five marathons were given an advanced type of heart screening called a spiral CT scan, which measures the amount of calcium plaque buildup in the arteries. The researchers found that about 35 percent of the marathon runners had significant buildup in their arteries - indicating they were at higher risk for a heart attack. Only 22 percent of non-marathon runners in a control group had the same amount of blockage.
Sidestep This Trap and Exercise Naturally
You may think that running a marathon is good for you because it gives your heart endurance training that will keep it going far into your old age. But don’t forget that your heart was designed by nature to beat for a lifetime. So what it needs is not endurance training but a signal to build and maintain capacity. It’s that reserve of extra power that will help get it through times of stress that challenge maximal output and cause heart attacks.
You can build up your heart’s reserve capacity in as little as 10 minutes a day. By gradually increasing your exertion and following that with focused recovery - the basis of my PACE (Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion) program - you build both your heart and your lung power.
Here is a simple starting program to grow your cardiopulmonary power by using an elliptical trainer. (You can substitute any exercise that challenges your heart and lungs.)
Set the trainer to manual and warm up for two minutes at 50 RPMs and a resistance level of 2. During your warm-up, gradually increase the speed to what feels like a 5 out of 10 exertion level. (For me, that’s about 75 RPMs.) Then increase the resistance by two levels every minute until you start to breathe hard or reach an 8 or 9 out of 10 exertion level. (For me, that means working up to a resistance level of about 14, which takes about five minutes. One minute at 4, one at 6, one at 8, one at 10, and one at 12.)
Now decrease the resistance to a level of 2 and watch as your heart rate recovers. If you’ve entered your supra-aerobic zone, your heart rate will continue to climb a bit during the first few seconds of this recovery period. That tells you your heart is paying back the oxygen debt you created, signaling your lungs to grow in capacity.
When you’ve recovered to a heart rate within 20 beats of the resting heart rate where you began, you’re done. Go hit the shower. Do this three times a week.
Remember, if you have medical problems, check with your doctor before starting any new exercise. And don’t forget the first principle of PACE: "progressivity." Always start out easy and gradually increase your exertion, week by week.

[djh]

I'm sorry. I don't buy this at all.

The closest I come to agreeing is: marathons do stress the heart. But that doesn't mean aerobic exercise is bad...

[ThatMoos3Guy]

Sounds like a similar premise as the tabata intervals (7x20seconds on/10seconds off). The science behind it is pretty solid, but my opinion is that it's always better to work up to that, after you've developed an aerobic base. It'll be interesting to see if rowing teams begin to adopt a lot more of these High Intensity Interval programs.

Another problem with the article and training for rowing is that the article targets people who just do long bouts of low intensity cardio. Most rowing plans do have a lot of this, however that's to allow you to recover from the more intense workouts, which are obviously very important for building speed.

[SirWired]

Any article that talks about "losing pounds of belly fat" is instantly suspect. No form of exercise can target where the body will chose to remove fat from.

SirWired

[NavigationHazard]

And IMO any MD who writes that "aerobic exercise actually takes years off your life" also is suspect. Yes, an indiscriminate exercise regimen may cause problems. Yes, prolonged weight-bearing aerobic exercise may not be suitable for everyone in the general population. But on the whole the benefits of aerobic exercise far far far outweigh the drawbacks.

An aside: it's not "lung capacity" in the Framingham study, it's "forced vital capacity" (maximum amount you can exhale). And correlation is not causality. FVC most likely is a proxy for a host of factors related to overall fitness and health.

[JohnBove]

The already-mentioned belly fat, the fact that he named it -- Supra-aerobics! -- and this: "only twelve minutes a day!"

He's peddling a product

[fish462]

I think one needs a variety of exercise to be truly fit. This includes longer duration, lower intensity workouts as well as short, high intensity workouts. However, I ran these articles by a cardiologist and he stated this is valid. Take it with a grain but I thought I would share. Thanks!

[NavigationHazard]

I don't think that anyone reputable would deny the benefits of comparatively intense interval training. At issue is whether it ought to replace altogether long-duration, low-intensity workouts. IMO, if you're training as a rower, or for erg competitions, you'd have to be insane to scrap them.

To begin with is the need for recovery. All speed all the time can be chronically debilitating, for which see mountains of literature on so-called "overtraining syndrome." Just as important, and maybe more so, are physiological adaptations that take place following steady-state "aerobic" workouts. By no means all of these are cardio-vascular. Intensive training might be better than steady-state work in optimally maximizing both peripheral-muscle and central cardiorespiratory adaptations in otherwise sedentary individuals. But there's a mountain of evidence linking things like mitochondrial development in the skeletal muscles for athletes to the longer, steady-state stuff....

[fish462]

I recommend reading Lean for Life by Clarence Bass. He advocates the use the Concept 2 rower throughout this book. He advocates shorter, high intensity workouts (overall) with maximum recovery time to prevent overtraining. He also has his own website: http://www.cbass.com.

Again, I think both types of training are needed for overall good health.

[Nezzie]

I too am suspicious of the articles. The author stated that anaerobic exercise burns some fats which is false. The body wants quick sources of energy and burning fat is by far not a quick source. In anaerobic the body can not get enough energy from oxidative phosphorylation so it turns to anaerobic processes to meet the remaining energy demands. Anaerobic exercise is good for lactate transportation and utilization but it is strengthening those systems not the aerobic systems. High intensity aerobic strengthens the muscles of the heart and increases red blood cells which carry oxygen to the tissues. Red blood cells are an important and very over looked part of training and are very important in performance. It is also important to note that the heart does not grow but strengthens (its a muscle so has very similar characteristics to skeletal muscle). The strengthening increases cardiac output by increasing stroke volume. I haven't studied lungs much but I would expect the same concept, the organ does not grow but efficiency increases with aerobic training, which is pretty much what the article says, but I would argue that the lungs as an organ can not grow. The only thing you can do is increase efficiency.

[pjc]

However, I ran these articles by a cardiologist and he stated this is valid.

Your cardiologist said what exactly? That intense, Tabata type workouts are effective? Or that regular aerobic exercise takes years off your life?

After my uncles triple bypass a few years ago, his cardiologist had him work up to regular aerobic sessions on his treadmill. I'd be surprised if cardiologists are now saying that aerobics shortens your life.

[TabbRows]

There's a lot of this stuff popping up these days. Fits right into all the diet scams around. And while there may be some soupcon of validity in the data, the fallacy of these things is that they extrapolate beyond what the study(ies) focused on to draw generalized conclusions for everyone and push people down a path of least resistance in vain slacker hope of staying healthly without doing the work, physically, mentally, nutritionally.

[anthonysemone]

Ah yes, myths die hard

tony

[Mike Caviston]

This may be of interest.

Abstract from “Exercise Preconditioning of the Myocardium", by Andreas N. Kavasis, in Sports Medicine vol.39, pp. 923-935, 2009:

Diseases of the heart (e.g. myocardial ischaemia reperfusion injury)
remain the major cause of death in the industrialized world. Therefore,
developing a pragmatic countermeasure to reduce myocardial ischaemia reperfusion
injury is vital. In this regard, a plethora of evidence indicates that
regular exercise can protect the heart during an ischaemia reperfusion insult
(i.e. cardioprotection). This review summarizes studies indicating that both
short-term (i.e. 1–5 days) and long-term (i.e. weeks to months) endurance
exercise provides cardioprotection. Data are presented showing that exercise
duration and exercise intensity are both important factors in achieving a
cardioprotective phenotype. Importantly, it appears that the exercise duration
of a single exercise session should last for 60 minutes and should be
performed at about 75% maximum oxygen consumption in order to achieve
exercise-induced cardioprotection. Furthermore, data are presented showing
that exercise-induced cardioprotection against myocardial stunning can persist
for at least 9 days after the cessation of exercise training, but is lost
18 days after exercise. This review also summarizes the exercise-induced
adaptations that occur to the myocardium. In particular, extrinsic changes
observed in human and animal models include neural, hormonal, humoral,
vascular and reduced body fat. Other anatomical and biochemical/molecular
changes that have been studied as putative mechanisms in exercise-induced
cardioprotection include alterations in anatomic coronary arteries, induction
of myocardial heat shock proteins, increased myocardial cyclooxygenase-2
activity, elevated endoplasmic reticulum stress proteins, nitric oxide production,
improved function of sarcolemmal and/or mitochondrial adenosine
triphosphate (ATP)-sensitive potassium channels and increased myocardial
antioxidant capacity. However, the most compelling evidence for exerciseinduced
cardioprotection is the fact that exercise training upregulates key
antioxidant enzymes that have been shown to promote cardioprotection.
Moreover, data are presented showing that exercise training induces cardiac
mitochondrial changes that result in reduced oxidant production. In addition,
recently our laboratory has shown that exercise training evokes changes
in mitochondrial phenotype that are protective against apoptotic stimuli.
Specifically, data are presented showing that several mitochondrial proteins
are altered following repeated bouts of endurance exercise and several of
these differentially expressed proteins are potential important cardioprotective
mediators. Finally, in hopes of stimulating debate and future research,
this review concludes with a discussion of unanswered questions related to
exercise-induced cardioprotection.

[iain]

This may be of interest.

Abstract from “Exercise Preconditioning of the Myocardium", by Andreas N. Kavasis, in Sports Medicine vol.39, pp. 923-935, 2009

Thanks Mike. One question though, how intense is 75% of maximum oxygen consumption in words dum ergers understand?

- Iain