How To Exercise - Why, How & What? - User Manual For Humans S1 E07 - Dr Ekberg

good evening and welcome to user manuals for humans part 7 today we will talk

about exercise we're going to talk about why how and what and as usual we will

not simply tell you what to do but we will explain what happens in the body so

that you have an understanding health-wise of why why things happen in

the body and what you can do to exercise appropriately for your particular

condition first of all exercise is basically for every cell in the body is

use it or lose it when you exercise you use every single cell every single organ

system in your body and just to reiterate a little bit talk about muscle

cells bone cells and brain cells how do you use a muscle cell you put tension on

it you put weights you put a resistance on a muscle and you will stimulate that

muscle to be maintained or grow how do you use a bone cell you put weight on it

in a field of gravity that is that gives the bone and message that it is being

necessary and therefore needs to make more bone to stay strong for future

demands how do you use a brain cell the brain is the purpose of the brain is to

process information to process electrical signals in particular so the

way to use a brain cell is to send an electrical signal to it we do this by

strip triggering receptors and we have receptors for light we have receptors

for sound we have receptors for touch but most of the receptors that we have

are for the purpose of detecting motion and changes in muscles and joints so

when we exercise we get a bigger effect of electrical

on the brain than virtually anything else that we can do we'll go into a

little bit more detail but basically the very foundation and exercise is use it

or lose it and because your body is made to be used it is not possible to

optimize your health without exercise and we'll get into what exercises also

does not have to be painful so some of the benefits are that you strengthen the

system in general you reduce insulin resistance which means you reduce the

incidence of prediabetes we talked about that a few weeks ago please feel free to

go back and refer to those videos that a muscle that is exercising does not need

as much or hardly any insulin to accept the sugar into the cell that reduces

insulin resistance we also and this is probably the reason that most people

think they need to exercise is to improve circulation this is more of a

byproduct it is still important but it's not the primary reason we want to

exercise circulation improves circulation improves oxygen delivery to

the tissues it improves nutrient delivery and it improves the exchange of

waste and nutrients in the tissues it also strengthens the heart but most

importantly it strengthens the brain and we talked about last time how the brain

has four absolutely necessary forms of inhibition and therefore when we talk

about stress and we know that the brain inhibits the stress that may be the

single most important function of exercise

that exercise stimulates the brain and therefore we can reduce the stress

directly with that and if we didn't know anything else that would be enough

reason to to do something about exercise so let's talk about drawbacks and you go

whoa you mean there are drawbacks to exercise everybody says to exercise what

could possibly be wrong with it well we can do we can certainly do too much and

we can do the wrong kind for what we're trying to achieve the first thing that

we need to realize with exercise and the drawbacks is that exercise is stress

exercise breaks the body down but at the same time exercise and activity is

something that we're designed for so even though exercise breaks the body

down it's a natural form of stress that as long as you get the appropriate

recovery you will regain strength and you will rebuild the body to a point

where it's stronger than it was before so yes it is stress but it's a good form

of stress it can however be bad if we do something that the body isn't prepared

for and we'll talk a lot about this healthy people can tolerate a lot more

exercise we can fatigue people which is actually most of the population over 30

or 40 need to be very careful they cannot tolerate very much exercise and

especially not high intensity exercise because it is a too-high form of stress

that it stresses their adrenal system and the hormonal system further and even

though there's some benefits to it from a fitness point they actually break the

body down and they become more unhealthy even though they seemingly are doing a

good thing let's talk a little bit more the circulatory benefits we know that

with exercise the heart pumps faster and therefore according to the use it or

lose it principle the heart will respond to that imposed demand and it will grow

stronger this means that the stronger heart muscle can fill better the heart

will typically get a little bit larger so it can fill with more blood but the

main difference in the stronger heart is that it can contract more forcefully and

expel more of the blood the portion of the quotient of the blood that they're

sending out and is a larger percentage and therefore the heart beats more

effectively when the heart beats more effectively then it takes fewer beats

overall for every minute of your life except during the exercise and therefore

as the heart beats fewer beats there's this theory that you will actually have

a longer life and there's certainly no evidence to contradict this the next

benefit of circulatory benefit is that it increases your blood perfusion that

you have these big arteries to have smaller arterioles and then you have

capillaries out in the peripheral tissues and these capillaries they're

not always wide open they're only kind of open enough for a few blood cells to

trickle through but during exercise that lasts more than 20 minutes the

capillaries open up all the way and we have full blood perfusion which means

that there's a full exchange of nutrients and waste in the tissues and

we don't really get to that point until we've exercised for about 20 minutes

there's also enzymatic processes in the body that everything that happens in the

body to produce more energy to take advantage of oxygen

and glucose and convert it into energy all those enzymatic and metabolic

processes are up-regulated that means that they happen more efficiently and

they happen easier so that we have an increased capacity to do that in the

future in other words the body simply runs better let's talk a little bit

about mitochondria in the cells mitochondria is a cellular component

that actually produces and manufactures all of your energy it is the component

inside your cell that can take oxygen and utilize it and turn it into energy

and when you exercise you up regulate the number of mitochondria you will

literally build more of them in response to that exercise so that you have a

better utilization of oxygen and you'll have the capacity to make more energy

for yourself that's certainly something to keep in mind in times of chronic

fatigue my favorite cartoon is the yen blast Bergen he has this guy at the

doctor and says for years your teachers kept telling you to settle down and sit

still you can stop so let's talk a little bit in detail about the brain

benefits that the brain is composed of tissue made up of cells and these cells

just like every other cell in the body is use it or lose it if you don't send

electrical impulses to it the cells will get weaker and have less work capacity

so if we have the brain up here

and the brain regulates a body part and

here's the body part and the body part has receptors and the receptors send

more information than this information will strengthen the brain and increase

the brain's capacity to regulate that body part and you get more information

and so forth so it is like a positive feedback cycle that feeds on itself that

the brain's ability to regulate this body part is based on the information

that the brain gets from this body part and if this body part doesn't move then

the brain gets less information the brain gets weaker and we have a negative

feedback cycle negative cycle so that's why with exercise we strengthen the

brain and we increase the brain's ability to regulate and overall we have

a better body control and with that we have fewer pains fewer diseases and so

forth and so forth plus I might add better athletic performance and that's

essentially what you do with athletic performance is that you practice the

behavior that becomes a pathway that strengthens certain brain cells so that

you'll be better able to do that future and one of the primary benefits

of chiropractic is that if we have a body part in particular maybe a bone

joint somewhere that isn't moving properly this creates this negative

feedback cycle so that the brain gets weaker and weaker has less capacity to

regulate this body part until we adjust it and restore these communication

pathways so the brain benefits the reason people get so healthy and we fix

so many things with exercise is that the brain gets activated I cannot state that

enough the number one reason to exercise is for the brain everything else is

pretty much a side effect so now we will talk about something called ATP

has anyone heard of ATP you guys actually have very good so ATP stands

for adenosine triphosphate and it simply means that there's a little molecule

over here called adenosine that is linked to three phosphate molecules and

this last bond the chemical bond right over here is what we call the high

energy bond and this is the way that humans and every other other cellular

life form uses energy is by breaking this bond we release energy that can be

made available for work in biological life-forms then once we break this then

this phosphate shoots off and we have what's called a DP adenosine diphosphate

which simply means that there's two phosphates attached and now we can't

have energy available until we use some other form of energy to stick this

phosphate back on so we have ATP again so this exchange is the energy to put

the phosphate back on is the energy that we get from food so the only reason that

we have oxygen and glucose and we eat calories is that we can put the third

phosphate back on that creates a high energy bond that when that bond is

released we free up energy that can be used in by all in biology biological

life-forms and what do we use what do we used ATP for everything nothing happens

in your body basically without ATP so let's start with membrane transport what

does that mean well shuttling tiny little molecules across a cell membrane

requires work the number one thing that the brain does in terms of signaling

virtually all signaling is just shuttling little molecules little ions

across cell membranes and that requires work so your brain is two percent of

your body weight it uses twenty percent of your calories and those calories are

converted into ATP so that you can shuttle molecules across membranes that

is what signaling is what else do we do well muscle contraction requires ATP

heartbeats require so anytime a muscle does anything that also requires ATP and

biosynthesis those molecules when we make hormones and enzymes and proteins

and new cells and DNA and RNA those molecules don't just pop together they

require energy to be synthesized to be assembled and that's also what ATP does

so ATP is the energy currency in the body now we have just a tiny tiny little

bit of ATP in the body at any given time this exchange we have ATP we break it

off and then energy from food puts it back together we actually use our entire

body weight worth of ATP every day so this popping off and reassembly happens

about a thousand to fifteen hundred times on the total amount of ATP and

again a day so if you weigh 200 pounds you're assembling 200 pounds of ATP in a

day so for any given the base amount that we have at any given time will give

us about three seconds worth of maximum intensity activity so let's talk about

how all of this happens where where does the energy come from and why and when do

we assemble war so visualize the Olympic final in the

hundred meters you have the guys lined up and they get ready and the gun goes

off and they take off they have a teepee they have energy for three seconds worth

of work then as soon as they start breaking off a teepee the body starts

using glucose to create more ATP otherwise they wouldn't make it to the

finish line they make them you see all of them just fall flat face at the

thirty meter line so somehow they make it through so the body makes more ATP as

it goes and the best source of ATP is called anaerobic metabolism that means

that we're using oxygen and glucose to make new ATP as we go and that is by far

the best because one single molecule of glucose can make 38 new molecules of ATP

the problem is we can't get the oxygen in fast enough and there's only so many

mitochondria to do this so in a fast sprint race like the hundred meters we

don't have time to replenish the ATP fast enough so we have some to start

with we start making more but it's still not enough so now we use another source

of ATP and that is we made ATP from glucose without oxygen and this is a

really fast way to do it the problem is we only get two ATP molecules for every

molecule of glucose so it's 19 times more efficient to make it with oxygen

but when we don't have the oxygen when available fast enough then we have to to

make it without oxygen and the problem is that there's a byproduct of lactic

acid and lactic acid is toxic to the MA and it hurts really bad and we also run

out of glucose so we can't we can't rely on that source for very long so when we

look at these sources we have ATP for about three seconds worth of activity

then we can break down glucose into lactic acid and make it last about one

minute so that's the guys who run the 400 they're using almost entirely the

metabolism the anaerobic metabolism that produces lactic acid but they can't go

much further than one lap because they're they're getting too toxic with

lactic acid and they're running out of glucose but if you slow down a little

bit and you start running 10,000 meters and marathons now you're slowing down

the activity enough that your metabolism your oxygen supply can keep up and that

is primarily aerobic metabolism and that's a very efficient and because of

that you can keep going as long as you have fat and carbohydrates in the body

which is several hours now the other thing that we need to consider is how

stressful is this for the body so only using ATP is not very stressful because

it's already there it's just available we just have to demand it and off it

goes but breaking down glucose into lactic acid and aerobic metabolism is

very stressful and therefore we can't keep it up very long and it's a huge

burden on the body the aerobic metabolism the purely aerobic is very

moderately stressful so we'll get back and talk about what people

how people should exercise that this is why we want to keep this in mind that

aerobic metabolism is not very stressful and aerobic metabolism is quite

stressful very good so types of exercise we've mentioned these but we'll go into

a little bit more detail aerobic metabolism basically means that we

exercise keeping our heart rate at or below 120 beats per minute and this is

not a number carven stone it's not true for everybody there's nursing there's a

range there's a give and take and you got to figure it out for yourself but

basically the way you determine is at 120 beats you can breathe comfortably

through your nose you do not have to breathe through your mouth and there is

no panting involved you can also if you have someone next to you on the bike or

running or walking you can maintain a relaxed conversation if you start

panting and you can only huff and puff and produce single words between your

office and pubs it is not aerobic metabolism anymore the third or that

another criteria for aerobic is that we have no lactic acid you do not feel any

heaviness in the body and there is no burn and aerobic means without air that

means most of it is still coming from oxygen but we're going faster than what

the body can keep up with as far as oxygen so part of it has to come

breaking down into lactic acid this is again it's a range it's a give and take

it's not an absolute number but from about 130 140 and up then it is I

aerobic and all the way up to maximum heart rate it's purely anaerobic there

the closer we get to to maximum heart rate the way we know maximum heart rate

is roughly 220 minus your age so if you're 50 years old then your heart

rates your maximum heart rate is around 170 if you're 30 years old it would be

around 190 just a little thing to to as a gauge anaerobic means we're starting

to breathe through the mouth or we're starting to breathe through the nose

with flared nostrils and and sounding really loud conversation becomes

strained and we also start getting some muscle burn so they're two different

types of exercise as far as metabolism aerobic and anaerobic other types of

exercise is also things like weight lifting weight lifting has a different

purpose weightlifting is putting tension on muscles for the purpose of improving

muscle tone and or muscle mass so depending on how you do that you can

either create tone or mass we won't cover a whole lot of that today what

will we might come back to that and then there's events specific training and

this is not so much training for improved circulation or burning calories

or improving muscle strength but it's specific to an event so we want to

improve a skill and this is all about improving the way that the brain and

that muscle coordinates their activity to perform that skill what this means in

terms in on the next slide what this means in

terms of what we can do aerobic means we keep it below 120 and those can be

things like walking biking swimming skating yoga tai chi and again we want

to get a heart rate monitor so we can measure and make sure that that we stay

below it is possible to walk and get above 120 you can bike and get over 120

so it's all about the intensity and how fast you go most people get very

surprised at how quickly they get up to 120 for people are used to anaerobic

type stuff doing aerobics at the gym and no pain no gain type mentality they will

not feel that they're doing anything whether they're getting up to 120

they'll feel like what's the point of this but that is for most people the

intensity they should be at for the most part anaerobic is 130 140 all the way up

to max and again I listed the same things walking biking swimming skating

but I also added running because that's what most people would would incorporate

and all you're doing is you're picking up the pace and you're making it a

little bit harder weight lifting again improve tone and mass so if you want to

improve tone then you want to limit the weights and increase the repetitions if

you want to improve your mass you have to give the body the message that they

need to get stronger and you don't give the body that message if you lift half

of what you're capable of so if you can bench press 200 pounds you're not going

to get stronger lifting 100 you need to get up into 180 hundred and

ninety pound range to send the body of the message that we need to get better

to cope with this in the future that's that's just common sense event specific

training that is things like golf tennis diving gymnastics javelin pole vault

very technique specific events and all you're doing is you're practicing a

particular pathway for the brain to connect to a muscle and like we said

before that we know in in neurologically based chiropractic that practice does

not make perfect practice makes permanent so for the event specific

training only when we do something correctly do we actually improve the

skill then we are fostering those those pathways that perform it correctly so

stress versus benefit most people when they talk about exercise and there's

this enormous misnomer and cliche out there no pain no gain that is that it's

so far from the truth that it is it should be criminal exercise does not

mean pain sweat and tears exercise simply means to activate the system the

purpose of exercise is up to you what do you want with it do you want to lose

weight do you want to get healthy do you want to get more clarity do you want to

get more energy are you do you want to get more fit are you practicing for

triathlon are you practicing for a race those are very different purposes so you

can't train one way and accomplish all of those most elite training most elite

athletes are not necessarily healthy they're extremely fit but

they're always pushing their bodies to the limit and it's on the verge of

breaking down and their internal organs are not typically very happy about it

they're being very very stressed so health and fitness are not the same

thing so if you exercise for health we're simply talking about activating

the system putting your body through ranges of motion and regular activity

that it is designed for that will maintain the function and that's what

help is if you want to get fit then you want to start doing things that that

will make you fit if you want to run a 10k race you have to practice things

that prepare you for a 10k race simple as that however if you don't exercise it

is not possible to optimize health it just won't happen your body and brain is

degenerating from this use and you're aging prematurely if you do not activate

your system if you exercise more than your body can recover from then your

exercise is destructive so we that's the first thing that we said that exercises

stress exercise will break your body down and it's only during the recovery

that you rebuild it so fortunately the body recovers pretty quickly so for most

people working out one day they will have recovered within a day or two

before they do the next workout but a lot of people who get addicted to

training from front work out every day they're actually not getting better

they're they're breaking their body down and they're never recovering back up to

the level that they started

now another effect of exercise has to do with hormones and there are two hormones

in particular there's three really with insulin but we covered insulin before

we've said that we reduce insulin resistance with exercise so now we'll

talk about cortisol and human growth hormone so cortisol is a stress hormone

its main purpose is to raise blood sugar so if we produce cortisol on a regular

basis as part of a an emotional stress response or lifestyle stress response

that actually contributes to insulin resistance another function of cortisol

is to inhibit the immune system so chronic production of cortisol is not a

good thing as a matter of fact it's probably linked to the majority of

diseases that we experience in the Western world today because most of

those are linked to blood sugar and immune system so exercise that is

stressful will trigger cortisol so therefore we can't do that type of

exercise a whole lot now let's go to this gets even more complicated

unfortunately human growth hormone is something that increases muscle mass and

strengthens bone it increases metabolism and fat burning it supports function of

insulin producing cells that prevents you from becoming diabetic it stimulates

the system and it even has anti-aging

properties so human growth hormone is a very very positive hormone it is it's a

rejuvenating hormone they even give it two elderly people who are going to

generated past the point of a functional life and they come back to more function

so we want more growth hormone and we want less cortisol the problem is they

both respond to high-intensity exercise so how do we get one without the other

so this is how it works cortisol is triggered by an aerobic workouts above

120 beats per minute human growth hormone is only triggered by extreme

intensity workouts so you have to do running or biking or something to get up

to within five or ten beats of your maximum heart rate so if your heart

rates 180 165 isn't enough even though that will make plenty of cortisol it's

not enough to trigger growth hormone to any large extent another way to do it is

to lift weights if you activate a large muscle group preferably something to do

with the legs and you get within ninety to a hundred percent of the maximum

effort so let's say that you're in the in the leg press machine and you can

squat 300 pounds there and let's say that you can do 250 pounds for six reps

well if you take 250 pounds and you at your at least eighty percent of your

maximum and you do a set until near failure that will

also trigger growth normal because it's a message to the body that we are under

stress we need to make we need to grow and reproduce and get stronger so that

we can we can cope with this in the future or if you do less than than going

to failure you need to get within ninety to ninety-five percent of your maximum

effort so here's a little bit of dilemma air and aerobic exercise makes cortisol

which we want to avoid extreme anaerobic exercise makes growth hormone that we

want so how do we solve this dilemma we will get to that in the next slide here

so let's just reiterate from 100 to 120 or so is aerobic exercise this will

increase fat burning it is has very little impact on fitness so if you're

looking for fitness aerobic pure aerobic exercise isn't going to do a whole lot

for you it will burn fat it'll make you healthy you'll activate all the systems

we talked about but you just won't get very fit on the good side it is very low

stress there's an insignificant amount of cortisol produced then when we get up

into the hundred 3260 which is typical and aerobic range now the proportion of

fat burning decreases we're burning proportionately more sugar because we

need to get the energy faster it still burns fat but not the same percentage

this will produce more fitness but it also can trade

into more stress and like we said the court is all now assuming someone's 40

years old or maximum heart rate is a hundred and eighty they need to get up

to about a hundred and seventy-five in heart rate or they need to do some

maximum form of weight weight exercise this is an extreme and aerobic exercise

so it decreases the initial fat burning so while you're doing this you're not

really burning any fat you're running on sugar however because of the growth

hormone release which can increase up to three to four hundred percent in just a

few seconds worth of work you will improve your metabolism and you will

increase your fat burning for the next 48 plus hours and this is why elite

athletes are so ripped that's why they have such a high metabolism because they

habitually get into that range of working out so their bodies will state

will burn a lot of fat not during the workout but afterwards this is very high

fitness and is extreme stress so now we have the basic picture now we need to

talk about how do we put this together so that we can get most of the benefits

without killing ourselves soon when we see these middle-aged women in the gym

with a personal trainer and they have thin legs and they have a big belly that

they're trying to work off these people are in

exhaustion the reason that they have that body shape is they have they have

exposed their bodies to chronic stress they made a lot of cortisol they've

exhausted their adrenals which make the cortisol and high-intensity and aerobic

exercise will make it worse they may lose a few pounds from the sheer effort

but they will make the condition even worse these people cannot get up into

the range of making more cortisol if they want to get healthy so that's a

very very important point to know how do we balance this won't for anybody you

want to do 80 to a hundred percent of your exercise aerobically if you are

stressed if you have any sign of exhaustion or fatigue or disease or

problems you need to give a hundred percent of your exercise aerobic you are

not ready for an aerobic exercise you can do some weight lifting keep it light

tone do all those things but you do not you will not get healthier by getting

into the anaerobic zone you will do for balance for for growth hormone we do

something called peak eight workouts and I will simply send you to mercola com to

look that up because he talks very warmly about that type of exercise and

he will also give you good advice about who can and who can't do it and how much

to do but basically even if you're in absolute fantastic shape you do not want

to do that more than twice a week and those workouts do not last more than

10-15 minutes so they have tremendous benefits for growth hormone but you need

to limit it because they're also very very stressful

they break your body down it takes many several days to recover even though it's

only 15 minutes and we're talking from a health perspective so if you're stressed

obviously you do not want to do any of the peak aids until your body has has

recovered you can do as you start getting a little better you can do maybe

a little bit of weight to to trigger the growth hormone but you probably want to

avoid the high heart rates then you want to do an aerobic workouts in moderation

if you enjoy it if you like going to the gym and doing the step aerobics and

which are actually an aerobics they call them aerobics but they are an aerobics

because they always get over 120 if you enjoy that and you like some fitness go

ahead because if you're healthy then you'll get more fit and it's not going

to hurt you but don't do them every day because you will stress your adrenals

also add weight workouts this is highly recommended because you will activate

the body and the brain in a different way you will activate muscles and joints

very appropriately and if you are not in fantastic shape then just keep the

weights down and keep everything light and easy and then work your way up and

just to your to a fitness and health level so that wraps it up for the most

part of the basic principles again the main thing to understand from this is

that it's not about blood sweat and tears is about activating the body so

some of the things that i recommend the warmest are things like yoga and tai chi

and pilates because they work in the arrow week zone they activate your brain

you take your body through ranges of motion so from a health standpoint all

of those probably the best thing that you can do

and then if you want to add on other more intense forms later than that be

fine too that concludes our presentation for today so if you have any questions

all we have to take those and now we'll see you next time thank you