3 Kinds of Exercise are Important for Health
Posted: Friday, July 17, 2009
by Donovan Baldwin
No Diet 4 Me
Years ago, when I first became aware of exercise as a potentially life changing event, I assumed that exercise was exercise, and you just picked what pleased you and went at it.
I was just a teenager then, and, to make matters a little worse, there had not been a whole lot of research done, or at least results released to the general public, and it was hard to get good information about exercise, unless you took a college course. Unfortunately, with exercise research still somewhat in its infancy, a lot of what was taught as "exercise fact" was, if not just plain wrong, often incomplete or biased.
I also began to see a fact, which they also mentioned from time to time in various ways, which would eventually become important to me, particularly as I moved into my senior years.
An exercise program could not only be molded to meet the needs and desires of the individual, but could be tailored for such things as age, physical impairment, time constraints, and a myriad of other factors.
It was also in reading the muscle mags that I began to realize that there were essentially three "kinds" of exercise.
Within each kind, you could also pick and choose an exercise, or range of exercises, which would help move you towards your goal.
However, there was one small problem.
While an athlete, or individual, might specialize in one kind of exercise in order to accomplish a given goal, no single kind of exercise "did it all", and someone exercising for health and overall fitness had to take some of each kind.
A great lesson in this was reading articles about the decathlon champions and their training regimens.
Someone who participated in the decathlon had to have an extremely high overall fitness level and be able to participate in activities demanding strength, flexibility and endurance. However, despite high competencies in these area, they could usually not compete directly in individual events with people who trained specifically for those events.
At the same time, I began to realize that those who trained specifically for an event had to either sacrifice some training in those other kinds of exercise or ignore training in them all together.
When you read about training regimens for weight lifters, for example, it was all about pounds lifted, even in training, and the idea of a weight lifter running or trying to touch his toes was practically laughable.
When someone wanted to train for overall health or fitness however, their training regimen began to resemble a scaled down version of the training for someone wanting to participate in the decathlon. They trained with all three kinds of exercises:
Strength
Flexibility
Endurance
While each type of exercise is likely to have some component of the others, each will also be very specific in one of the main areas mentioned.
For example, resistance training, what most people think of as weight training, or weight "lifting", is usually very specific in increasing strength, but, when done as it normally is, does not do much for flexibility or endurance. Running can do a lot for endurance, but will have a much smaller effect on strength and flexibility. Stretching exercises will normally aid with flexibility without doing much for strength or endurance.
In order to get "physically fit", someone really has to do a range of exercise which encompasses all three types of exercise, as opposed to someone who wants to train for a sport which requires an athlete to be outstanding in one particular area.
In olden days, i.e. the 50's and the 60's, a weight lifter, for example, would concentrate on lifting more weight and would not worry too much about endurance or flexibility. Athletes such as baseball players and tennis players would concentrate a little more on endurance perhaps, but many felt that the specifics of their particular sports were where they needed to "exercise". Trainers would nod their heads when discussing using weights or yoga as part of a training regimen, but would concentrate on the mechanics of the particular sport.
As knowledge of exercise evolved, however, even the most die-hard old school trainers and athletes began to realize that, even in their sport-specific worlds, incorporating the three types of exercise usually helped the athlete perform their activities better.
In the "real" world of non-athletes such as you and I, and I have exercised regularly since 1970, experts have also reached the conclusion that an exercise schedule which includes the three types of exercises is most effective, not only for health and fitness but for weight loss and for experiencing the broad range of the health benefits of exercise.
However, if the idea of having to do three different exercise routines seems a bit much, it is possible to design routines in such a way that your total exercise commitment, while not excessive, manages to cover the range you need...but that's going to be another article.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Donovan Baldwin is a freelance writer who has been publishing articles on health, fitness, diet, and weight loss for several years. He currently resides with his wife and 15 year old dog in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He is retired from the U. S. Army where he served for 21 years, and is a University of West Florida alumnus (BA Accounting 1973).
To learn more about a wide range of health products, please visit http://nodiet4me.com/health_products .
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