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Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic Exercise Overview

Aerobic exercise is the type of moderate-intensity physical activity that you can sustain for more than just a few minutes with the objective of improving your cardiorespiratory fitness and your health. "Aerobic" means "in the presence of, or with, oxygen." You know you're doing aerobic exercise when your heart's thumping and you're breathing faster than you do at rest but you can sustain the activity for extended periods of time. I recommend the cue "warm and slightly out of breath" to determine if your activity level is aerobic. Walking, jogging, biking, dancing, and swimming are examples of activities that can be performed aerobically.

Anaerobic, on the other hand, means "the absence of, or without, oxygen." Anaerobic exercise is performed at an intensity that causes you to get out of breath quickly and can be sustained for only a few moments. Weight lifting and sprinting are examples of anaerobic exercise.



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Aerobic Exercise

Running »

History of Running

The conventional thinking among most scholars is that early man (hunter-gatherers) ran in short sprints as a matter of survival—to catch prey and escape danger—but that running, and particularly endurance running, was merely a byproduct of the ability to walk and not a natural part of our evolution. The argument goes that (1) running is less efficient than walking (you burn more calories doing it), and (2) humans are poor sprinters compared to four-legged animals (who run much faster), and so it is concluded that we were never designed, or "born" to run. In evolutionary terms, scientists would say that we were not adapted for running.

But University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble and Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman suggest otherwise. In their research, published in the prestigious journal Nature, they claim that the "roots of running may be as ancient as the origin of the human g...

Read the Running article »



Read What Your Physician is Reading on eMedicine

Therapeutic Exercise »

DeLateur defined therapeutic exercise as the prescription of bodily movement to correct an impairment, improve musculoskeletal function, or maintain a state of well-being.

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