is hiit better than steady cardio there are three main benefits to exercise and
hiit or high-intensity interval training uniquely provides that third benefit so
make sure you stay tuned and hear it all out I am doctor Ekberg with wellness for
life and if you'd like to get as healthy as possible and truly master health by
understanding how the body really works make sure you hit that subscribe button
and the notification bell so that you don't miss anything why do we exercise
in the first place what's the purpose why is exercise necessary for human
health to optimize human health well we can look at it three different ways the
first and primary benefit of exercise is that it stimulates the brain and
movement stimulates the brain so this is dancing or doing Taichi
or stretching or playing hopscotch or tossing a ball all those things activate
your nervous system there involve coordination and movement so that's the
primary purpose of exercise the second purpose is circulation it increases
circulation you increase your heart rate you increase the output of the heart so
the increased heart rate multiplied by the increased heart output how much it
pumps with each heartbeat means that even something like walking where you
might double your heart rate you might actually increase your heart output your
blood flow your circulation many times more than that and what the circulation
do the blood circulating more and faster and reaching more cells means that
you're delivering more nutrients and you're taking more toxins away
that's called drainage and that's a very healthy that's part of detoxification
it's part of staying healthy is eliminating the waste products the third
thing that a lot of people kind of miss is that exercise is stress and that can
be a good thing and can be a bad thing so without stress our
bodies would continuously degenerate they would just get weaker and weaker
and weaker and weaker until they just fade away and die stress is absolutely
necessary it's the only reason the body has to respond to anything to grow and
get better so think about a muscle if you lift some weights you build some big
strong muscles and then you hurt yourself you sprain the wrist you put it
you put your arm in a cast you break a bone then a couple of months later when
that cast comes off there is no muscle there because you didn't activate it you
put didn't put any stress on it you didn't give the body a reason to
maintain that strong muscle and the body says hey must not be important I'm not
gonna send precious resources to rebuild that muscle when it obviously has no use
so everything in the body has a purpose there's that there's a reason it's there
and we have to stress it a little bit so high-intensity exercise has the purpose
of stressing the body it's a challenge it's a reason for the body to become
more if we don't push the limits ever then the body is very comfortable and
there may not be anything wrong with that if you're just content walking and
creating some circulation then that may be enough for you but there are
tremendous benefits to high-intensity exercise because in order for your brain
in order for your nervous system to repair in order for your nervous system
to learn learning involves making new synapses when nerve cells connect to
each other they create synapses and what's called
neural networks and the same process is involved with repair and rebuilding so
they're kind of the same thing learning and repairing and there are two hormones
that are required and they're called human growth hormone
and brain-derived neurotrophic factor don't worry about the name it's BDNF and
just know these two hormones aren't necessary they're essential for the
brain to make new synapses and they have also shown very recently that with
enough of these two hormones and enough of a challenge your brain can actually
make new brain cells all together not just synapses but new brain cells and
they have found that it can make those in the areas of the brain responsible
for memory and that's a major concern for a lot of people as they age they
lose their memory well there is now a known mechanism that you can restore
some of those cells but it depends on human growth hormone and brain derived
neurotrophic factor and the number one thing to produce more of these two
hormones is high intensity exercise but you have to really really challenge your
body you have to do something you have to push your body to failure so if
you're doing push-ups or you're doing squats or you're doing high-speed
stationary bike you have to do it as if your life depended on it
until you fail because then your body says hey what I did this time wasn't
good enough I need to get better I need to become more so I can handle this
challenge next time and it produces as much as three to four hundred percent
more of these hormones these hormones are so powerful as rejuvenating hormones
that they're often given to the elderly as a way of restoring their health the
problem is when you add it from the outside when you give it as a drug it
has side effects and it has the potential of increasing risk of cancer
if you do it naturally through exercise there are none of the side effects none
of the ill effects you have only benefits
natural benefits from it in the thing to keep in mind with the high-intensity
exercise also is that because it is so incredibly stressful you don't want to
do much of it because you want to do enough that you create a challenge but
not so much that you break the body down remember exercise breaks the body down
then recovery allows the body to rebuild so if you break it down too much then it
doesn't have the time and the resources in between workouts to recover and
rebuild so the key to high-intensity exercise is to increase gradually so
that you know that your body's health and your physical shape can can tolerate
it so you don't go right into just all-out
you you build up and make sure that your body can tolerate it and you check with
your physician if there's any contraindications or any reasons why you
shouldn't be able to do that and then when you do it you can do as little as
five or ten minutes there are different programs you can check various different
videos look on the Internet age I I T high-intensity interval trainings and
some of these workouts you can do in as little as three or four minutes if you
include warm-up you might spend 10 15 20 minutes but the active time that you're
doing this should be just a couple of minutes so that also makes it very time
efficient for people who don't have a lot of time to exercise you don't have
to have hours and hours you have 15 minutes you can do it often times you
won't even break a sweat because it is so brief and you also don't need to do
it very often because once you trigger that growth hormone 2 3 400 percent
increase it stays high for up to 48 72 hours it declines gradually but even 3
days later you're gonna have some residual increased level of that growth
hormone and therefore you don't want to do it more than 2 or 3 times a week
because it is very stressful but the benefits stay with you for several days
and another nice benefit for people to know is that growth hormone is a fat
burning hormone so even though you don't exercise for a very long time and you
technically don't burn all that many calories during the workout you burn
much much more energy much much more fat for fuel in the days after the workout
because you increase your metabolism and you're increasing this growth hormone if
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