Exercise helps you feel youthful and full of vitality—critical components to fighting the effects of aging.
Most of us have gone through various exercise programs at different periods in our lives—dating all the way back to our early school days.
Surprisingly, few of us truly understand how exercise works.
If we did, we would never stop.

Without wanting to sound over-simplistic, there are basically two critical types of exercise, cardiovascular and resistance training.
Let’s look at both.

By the way, if you have not done an exercise program for a while, please consult your physician before beginning.

CARDIOVASCULAR EXERCISE

If asked what cardiovascular exercise means, most of us would answer simply that “it’s good for the heart.”
While correct in principle, this response in no way explains how or why cardiovascular exercise helps our heart.
Very few of us could actually explain the mechanics. If more of us knew the how and why, we would never neglect this critical component to maintaining our youth.
Here’s how it works.

Cardiovascular training is designed to exercise the heart muscle.
We begin some form of exercise—jogging, walking, doing aerobics or cycling and through that exercise we increase the rate at which our heart beats per minute.
This process exercises the heart muscle.
We must sustain the increased heart rate in order to gain the maximum benefit.
Through this exercise the heart muscle gets stronger.

The true benefit doesn’t happen until later, after the exercise has been completed.
With a stronger muscle, the heart needs to beat fewer times per minute to flow the same amount of blood through our systems.

Think about it.
If over the long term your heart beats fewer times per minute, it does not wear and tear anywhere near as fast as if it beats at a higher rate.
The same heart accomplishes the same job, with much less effort.

Conversely, the same heart could take twice as much effort to achieve the identical objective—which also means that it will wear out that much faster.
Which would you rather have?

When we exercise, we want to build the heart muscle to a point where each beat produces the same blood flow that used to require a beat and a half, or even two beats.
Can you see how much younger you might feel if your heart worked half as hard to get the same result?
Over time, a strong heart muscle translates to a longer, healthier life, with a far more youthful feeling.

A word of caution: Once approved by your physician, you must start slow.
On day one, the heart muscle is not strong enough to produce the beats necessary to keep up with a higher pace for very long.
Failure to proceed with caution can lead to a heart attack or other complications.
We need to build slowly, although absent other factors, there is never an age too late to begin exercising for a younger heart.
Walking is a great form of cardiovascular exercise that anyone can start anytime.

As an added bonus, cardiovascular exercise will release endorphins, chemicals in our body and brain, which produce a euphoric feeling, a natural high.
Don’t you want to feel 20 when you’re 40, or 30 when you’re 50?

To stay young, we need a healthy heart.

RESISTANCE EXERCISE

Weight training, isometrics with rubber bands, push-ups or any exercise that puts resistance against the muscles, is called resistance exercise.
In so doing, we actually tear down the muscle one fiber at a time.
A substance called lactic acid builds inside the muscle.
Lactic acid is released to provide fuel when our body runs out of glucose.

The muscle then rebuilds itself stronger than before, more able to hold and flow blood.

As we tone the muscles and increase the ability of the blood to be stored there, this in turn increases the size or hardness of the muscle.

Who doesn’t want to have a bigger or at least harder muscle tone?

Put the two together.
Through cardiovascular exercise, we strengthen our heart muscle and its ability to flow our blood.
Through resistance training, we increase our ability to get blood into the muscles and feed our bodies.
The combination makes us young.

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