Before, During and After Aerobics
When you’re starting aerobics, the temptation is to
throw yourself into it, and that’s fine as long as you’re
careful.
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Even if you’re late to class, it’s important to
warm up, stretching your muscles and getting your heart rate
up gradually.
If you try to do too much, your body will take revenge by burning fat less
efficiently, (or by hurling you to the floor with a charley horse). So be
patient, Grasshopper, and know that as long as you are exercising at no more
than 75% of your maximum heart rate, you are burning fat at an optimal level.
In
this case, more is not better, and may be worse, as working at high intensity
(85% of maximum heart rate and above), actually causes your body to reduce by
about 65% the amount of fat it is burning.
If
that isn’t enough incentive to keep your heart rate in a
reasonable realm, bear in mind that “maximum heart rate”
is the number of beats your heart can beat per minute
right before you drop dead from overexertion. You don’t ever want to approach your maximum heart rate!
More is also not better in terms of duration.
Your
workout should be at least a half an hour, but after
sixty minutes of exercise, your body stops burning as
much fat. There’s no sense in overdoing it. Your body
understands moderation and will fight to conserve some
of that fat: you might need it tomorrow!
Overexertion can also increase the chance that your
muscles will be sore the day or two after exercising.
When your body doesn’t provide enough oxygen to its
cells during exercise (as in anaerobic conditions),
cells react by creating lactic acid, and it’s the build
up of lactic acid in the muscles that causes soreness.
Most aerobics instructors give two sets of instructions
– one for advanced students and one for beginners.
Resist the desire to look like an advanced student, or
tomorrow you will feel like you’ve been run over by a
truck (and the second day after overextending
yourself in a workout is even more painful). Do the
low-impact routine until it starts to get easy (and that
could take weeks), then move into the higher-impact
stuff gradually as you learn the steps and your fitness
level improves. Not sure how to tell the difference
between low and high impact aerobics? The lower-impact
workout will have you stepping or walking the dance
steps while the higher-impact workout has you bouncing
or hopping them. As you raise your fitness level, your
movements will become bigger, too, and you’ll be
covering more ground when you travel.
Your goal is a moderately intense workout, which will
cause your body to burn fat at its highest rate –
between one-half to one gram of fat per minute. One easy
way to check the intensity of your workout is to see
whether you can talk while exercising. The genius of a
good aerobics instructor is partly in the ability to
create interesting choreography to match the music. You
should be able to talk without gasping: you should not
be able to sing. |
