Exercise! Love it or hate it, let's motivate each other to just DO IT!

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Old 03-18-2003, 02:37 PM   #1  
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Default How much is too much

Exercise I mean, it is possible to do to much exercise in 1 day???
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Old 03-18-2003, 03:36 PM   #2  
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I think that your body will tell you. You need to learn to listen to your body. I do about an hour a day but that is over a year of working up to it.I would go slow.
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Old 03-18-2003, 10:36 PM   #3  
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Yeah, there's definitely an upper limit - but it really depends on your age, current physical fitness, weight, etc., etc. You can reach a point during exercise when you're actually not helping yourself anymore, and you might be hurting yourself... working your body too hard and not letting it rest, risking injury and honestly, probably inducing early burn-out.

From all I've read recently, I believe the recommendation is an hour per day of aerobic exercise. For strength-training, it shouldn't really take anymore than an hour to complete any workout, and an optimal workout is one or the other (either aerobic/cardio OR strength-training) - though I've heard conflicting stories on that, I still believe it to be true (I've gotten better results by not doing both on the same day, and always resting at least a day in between strength-training days).

There are days when I go over an hour, when I'm "in the zone" or whatever, but as a general rule, I keep it to an hour. Unless you're a serious athlete in training for a specific event like a marathon or triathlon, there's no need to push yourself more than an hour a day & the benefits you might receive will probably be short-lived.
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Old 03-23-2003, 08:55 AM   #4  
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Hello

Yes, I think there is overdoing it... especially on cardio equipment. According to my training, you should do a maximum of it at a time or it will start burning muscle rather than fat. Also in strength training, I think doing much more than the recommended will cause more harm than help.

I usually do an hour of cardio and then about 45 minutes to an hour of strength training... try to do it 3 or sometimes 4 times a week and then do some cardio at other times as time permits... treadmill, cross-trainer, whatever.

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Old 07-15-2003, 02:00 AM   #5  
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Your body is capable of tolerating A LOT of physical activity. Much more than an hour a day. Think back to earlier times, people farmed for hour upon hour, think about loggers or construction workers from the early days of the US toiling all day long. They say those loggers burned up to 8000 kCal/day in the Pacific Northwest at the beginning of the forestry industry. It's up to you how much you can tolerate before injury, fatigue, discomfort set in.

Don't put up a mental barrier at the one-hour mark. Keep extending your workout as time permits and see what you are really capable of!
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Old 07-15-2003, 01:59 PM   #6  
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There really is no real reason why you should restrict yourself to 1 hour - IF you are fit and able enough to do so without injuring yourself. The best thing to do is to start off slowly.

For example:

Start off withwith 20 minutes a day on say 3 days a week and then build up

2 weeks later add another day, so now you do 20 minutes on 4 days per week. When you are doing 20 minutes on 6 (7 if you really want to) start adding 5 or 10 minutes to each day, slowly!!

When you have enough, by feel, you can start to experiment with zoning your workout:

Mondays: 45mins cardio, 30 mins strength
Tues: 30 mins yoga, 30 mins developmental stretching
And so on.... wahtever you enjoy and have access to!

As for the idea that if you work too long or too hard you start to burn muscle INSTEAD of fat this comes from a much written about, much talked about misunderstanding about how your body works. The physiology behind this is quite complex BUT if you think about it like this then you won't buy into this common misunderstanding:

If you work at about 60% max you are working within your comfort zone, you can work here for quite a long time. You are not overtaxing your body so you stay injury free and you use your body's primary and most easily accessed fuel source - stored energy within the fat cells.

If you work at 80%+max then you will find that you cannot work for quite as long, you are beginning to really stretch your body and are taxing it quite strongly. This leaves you open to minor injuries, stretches and strains etc. Because you are working faster than you body can support with its favourite fuel source it switches a little bit of its energy use to your secondary fuel source, energy stored in non-fat cells.

Now you are still burning fat (using your aerobic system) but you are now ALSO using your anaerobic system. As you are working harder (if you manage to keep up the time etc) then you are burning MORE CALORIES, so you are burning more energy, more fat produced energy and more of the non-fat produced energy!

As you can see the switch from aerobic to anaerobic is NOT instead of but AS WELL AS! This is the bit that a lot of writers either don't fully understand, misinterpret or don't write clearly enough for us to understand! And quite frankly if the writers of our magazines can't get it right what hope have we?

I hope this helps, my degree in exercise science had to come in useful some time! If you think you may have some more of these commonly known, but not quite accurate bits of info running around your head write me a note, and I will try to explain how it really goes!

Stef
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