Exercise… Your Drug of Choice, Part III

Exercise... Your Drug of Choice, Part III

By Coach Dan Huff, CSCS

Welcome to part three in the Exercise… Your Drug of Choice series. If you’ve missed out on parts one and two you can scroll down the page to read them, but here’s a quick overview for you.

In Part I of this series we looked at the addictive quality of exercise. Do you know why you are exercising or are you just doing it for the sake of doing it? Do you have well thought out goals? Are the nice little concepts (lose a few inches, drop a few pounds, get a little stronger) or are the quantifiable (lose 3 inches, drop 7 pounds, get 25% stronger)? Remember that there is a vast difference between exercising every day with a clearly defined goal in mind and exercising everyday because you are addicted to exercise. Don’t get addicted!

In Part II we discussed just a few of the diseases that exercise has been proven to help prevent and/or manage. While exercise has never been shown to cure any diseases it is definitely an aid to preventing and managing coronary artery disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity to name a few. In this instance exercise is a beneficial “drug” in the fight to improve both the quantity and the quality of your life.

Now, in Part III, we are going to look at the fact that exercise, like drugs needs to be prescribed. Imagine if your doctor told you that you had a very serious illness handed you 5 bottles of pills and sent you on your merry way. What would you do? Which pills do you take first? Do you take them with a meal or on an empty stomach? What are their side effects? You would be completely lost and have very little chance of doing the right thing. Unfortunately, that’s how many of us approach our time in the gym. We know that there are a few key components to fitness that need to be addressed, but what order should we do them in? How much of each should we do? How much is too much, how much is not enough? Are we even doing it correctly? Just like with medicine, with no exercise prescription you are just guessing what the right combination is and most likely you will fail.

So how do you figure out how to develop your exercise prescription? Well, you need to know two things in order to develop an exercise prescription. First, you need to know your current fitness level in the 5 components of physical fitness. And second, you need to know where you want your fitness level to be in those 5 components. In simple terms, you need to know where you are starting and where you want to be. Setting your goals determines your prescription.

Let’s take a look at the 5 components of physical fitness. They are body composition, flexibility, cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, and muscular strength. All of these components are measurable and therefore need to be a part of your goal setting.

Body Composition is very simply that, what your body is composed of. How much of your body is made up of fat and how much is lean body mass (bones, muscles, organs, etc.)? When dealing with body composition you will be looking at a percentage number and as long as that percentage moves in the right direction you are on the right track. Notice that I just said that the percentage moves in the right direction, not that your weight moved in the right direction… more on that later.

Flexibility is more then just, “Can you touch your toes?” Flexibility is the ability of your joints to move through a functional range of motion. That functional range of motion is going to be different for everyone. A baseball player need to be able to move his shoulder into extreme ranges at high speeds. A CEO sitting behind a desk for 60 hours per week needs the should flexibility to reach into desk draws, overhead onto bookshelves, and across the desk to shake hands. Two completely different people with two completely different needs for the same joint of their body. The key to flexibility is the ability to maintain the ability of your body to function as it moves through space.

Cardiovascular endurance is the ability of your heart and lungs to function properly as you perform steady state activity. So now, what is steady state activity? Steady state activity is any form of activity that allows your body to maintain the same activity level for an extended period of time. The most common examples of this are walking, jogging, or bike riding. They are very rhythmic in nature so your heart and lungs can also fall into a rhythm. The “endurance” aspect is in your ability to perform these activities over a longer and longer period of time.

Muscular endurance is similar to cardiovascular endurance in that it is the ability of your body to do something over a longer and longer period of time. But it is different in that it is not your cardiovascular system doing the work, it is your muscles doing the work this time. Instead of performing a rhythmic activity such as walking, jogging, or cycling, muscular endurance is measured with strength training activities such as push ups, sit ups, lifting weights, or working against another form of resistance. When you can perform more repetitions against a specific resistance you have improved you’re your muscular endurance.

Muscular strength is the counterpart to muscular endurance. When looking at muscular endurance you want to perform more repetitions with the same resistance. When looking at muscular strength you want to perform the same number of repetitions against a higher resistance. Basically muscular strength is the amount of weight that you can lift and improving your muscular strength means that you can now lift more weight.

So let’s get down to the business of figuring out where you stand in each of the 5 components of physical fitness and where you would like to go in each of those components. In part IV of Exercise… Your Drug of Choice we will be covering exactly how to dial in your prescription according to the diagnostics of your fitness examinations that we covered here.