Fitness professionals and exercisers alike seem to think it is the enemy and should be avoided at all costs.

“Don’t exercise too hard, you’ll get lactic acid in your muscles and they’ll take days to recover.”

“Lactic acid will cause muscle damage and stop you from training.”

Knowing how lactic acid is produced in the body is useful to improving your fitness.

So what is lactic acid and why am I saying it isn’t your enemy?

When you exercise, glucose (sugar, carbohydrate) is broken down into different chemicals, to produce energy in a form the muscles can use. As long as your heart, lungs and blood can get enough oxygen to the working muscles, you break the glucose down completely and end up with useable energy, carbon dioxide and water. This is is called aerobic exercise.

If you exercise at a high intensity and the oxygen supply isn’t sufficient to meet the demands of the contracting muscles, glucose isn’t broken down completely and lactic acid is produced. This is anaerobic exercise.

Increased lactic acid in the muscles decreases the pH and this leads to the burning feeling that makes you slow down or stop. It’s like a built-in safety mechanism. Lactic acid can also move out of the muscles into the blood and this may be why people feel nauseous after an intense effort (e.g 400m race).

Because lactic acid causes us to slow down and results in discomfort or pain, it has been labelled as bad. However, it is when our muscles are working at the point of lactic acid accumulation that they are stimulated to “get fitter” by producing more enzymes, increasing blood vessels, producing more red blood cells etc. Up until the point at which there is sufficient oxygen to meet demand, the muscles are quite comfortable so don’t “need” to get fitter. It is at the point where lactic acid starts to accumulate that the muscles realise they need to be fitter.

How do you know if you are exercising hard enough?

You’ll know you are exercising hard enough, when you start to breath hard. When lactic acid accumulates and the pH in the muscles and blood goes down, the body responds by chemical reactions that neutralise the acidity. A by-product of these chemical reactions is carbon dioxide. It is this build up of carbon dioxide that makes us breath harder and “puff.”

So what does this mean?

Firstly, it means that lactic acid isn’t your enemy. In fact, it is your friend. Think of it as your fitness conscience that tells your muscles to get into better shape. And the better shape they are in, the higher intensity exercise you can do before you reach the point of lactic acid accumulation, meaning you are fitter.

Secondly, it means if you want to get fitter you need to train in a way that pushes you to the point of lactic acid accumulation. Now because you can’t maintain this level of exercise for very long, you have to do short bursts of exercise. This is why interval training works so much better to improve fitness. You push hard for a minute or two and accumulate lactic acid in the working muscles and blood, then slow down to let the muscles use up some of the lactic acid.

Thirdly, when you push yourself and start to breath faster, it is a good indicator that you are working hard enough. It means your body is producing carbon dioxide to buffer the lactic acid. When this happens, try to exhale strongly to clear the carbon dioxide from your body and speed up the recovery process.

Then…. when you have got your breath back to normal you can do it again!!

Five efforts (intervals)s like this during your workout is sufficient to tell the muscles to get fitter.

The good news is that the fitter you are, the better the body gets at using up the lactic acid and blowing off the carbon dioxide. It’s why athletes recover so quickly after a race and can talk to the TV person.

The alphas’ parents will predominantly come from generations X and Y and according to a leading social researcher, this could be the biggest generation to date.

The alphas are expected to have many career opportunities due to the skills shortage and starting their careers  at a time when the ageing population hits its peak and older people are leaving the workforce.

However, the alphas are also going to face the challenge of working out how best to care for the elderly in the long term.  Paying for it may fall on the alphas.

At the same time, new technology increases the risk that the alphas will lead a sedentary lifestyle with the accompanying health issues.  So not only will the health system be struggling with a older demographic, but this younger generation will put additional strain on it due to a sedentary lifestyle.

What can current generations do to give the alphas’ a chance at better health?

The greatest contribution baby boomers, gen X and Gen Y can do is to be positive role models in relation to their own health and fitness.  Each generation learns from the ones ahead of it.  If they see their parents leading healthy lifestyles, they are more likely to do the same.

If they see their parents and grandparents exercising and maintaining their fitness, they are more likely to do the same.  The choices they make are influenced by what they see generations ahead of them doing.

The biggest influence current generations can do, is to be an example of the lifestyle that will lead to better health and fitness; balancing work and family life, eating healthy foods and exercising regularly.

Do you bit and be a role model.

Your children and grandchildren are going to need all the help they can get.

He was always telling us to work harder at training than we had to in our games, and that the harder we pushed ourselves at training, the easier the games would be.

I don’t play basketball any more, but the principle applies equally to fitness for life.

While there are hundreds of health reasons to exercise and be fit, I believe one of the key benefits of being fit, is that it makes the rest of your life easier.

Let’s face it, just walking to the shops is hard work if you aren’t fit. Mowing the lawns and gardening can be too much for some people, and if you aren’t strong enough, carrying the shopping home can be almost impossible. Eventually for some people, just getting up out of a chair is a major effort.

Although this may seem extreme and a long way off, the more your fitness declines, the more difficult everyday tasks become.

At first you won’t notice. But gradually you’ll start to find tasks that used to be easy, gradually seem harder to do or you won’t be able to do them at all. Little things like moving something heavy or opening a jar.

Or you’ll notice that you get tired quicker than you used to. And muscles that you didn’t know you had are sore and you can’t remember doing anything that strenuous.

People, who let their fitness decline too much, lose risk losing their independence. Some can no longer stay in their own home because they can’t do everyday activities or they are at risk of falling. Obviously nobody wants to be forced from their home because they can’t cope.

So, next time you are struggling to get out of bed or to motivate yourself to do your exercise, just imagine how your life would change if you could no longer do the everyday things you enjoy doing.

Maintaining your fitness levels is the only way to prevent everyday activities becoming hard work. In fact, staying fit and strong not only prevents life getting harder, but it makes day-to-day tasks seem easy.

The harder you work, the easier life gets!

I can guess what you’re thinking… but I was actually waiting for a segment on health and fitness that was coming up soon.

Before that, an infomercial came on making grand claims about some new exercise equipment that would change your life without you having to do anything strenuous.

There were two attractive young women using this machine with big smiles on their faces, hardly breaking a sweat while the promoter claimed you only had to exercise for a few minutes a day and didn’t have to even get out of breath. Doing just a few minutes of gentle exercise you were guaranteed to lose kilos of weight, tone your abs and have long shapely legs and butt.

It sounded fantastic and they guaranteed that if you weren’t happy you could return the machine and get your money back. Then they had ‘happy customers’ making outrageous claims about how much weight they had lost, how many dress sizes they and dropped and how their whole life had turned around.

I get so frustrated when television channels run these advertisements. While the equipment might in itself be okay, anyone that claims you don’t have to put in some effort or breathe hard is kidding themselves and conning you.

As good as any exercise equipment is, the key to getting fitter is to push yourself out of your comfort zone and to do a variety of different exercise not just one action on a machine.

And while I have been telling you to exercise with more intensity for less time, you won’t get fit dong a few minutes a day if you aren’t prepared to push yourself.

So next time you are tempted to pick up the phone and order that wiz-bang exercise machine that is going to change your life, remember you still have to do the work and do a variety of different exercises.

And next time someone claims that this one piece of equipment is all you need, get off the couch and do some exercises. You’ll soon realize you don’t need buy anything to get fitter.

You just need to put in the effort.

While it follows that the harder you are exercising the more likely you are to get hot and sweat, the opposite isn’t necessarily true. Just because you are sweating a lot doesn’t mean you are working hard.

I read an article in the newspaper a week ago about a form of yoga that you do in a humid 38C room. The article stated that participants, some of who were athletes and no doubt very fit, claimed it was the hardest thing they had ever done and that people often felt nauseous and dizzy. I’m sure they did find it hard and they felt bad while exercising. However I expect the heat had more to do with it than the exercise.

When you exercise blood is directed to the working muscles to supply the oxygen and fuel needed. When you get hot, blood is directed to the skin so that heat can be lost from the body to keep your internal temperature constant.

When you exercise in a hot environment, the heart and lungs have to work extra hard because they are trying to get blood to both the muscles and the skin. As a result, blood is diverted away from other organs. This means a person exercising in the heat will usually have a higher heart rate giving them the perception that they are exercising harder. People feel nauseous because blood is diverted away from the gut; this also adds to the perception of working harder.

Because we use our heart rate and breathing to ‘assess’ how hard we are working, when we exercise in the heat, it often feels like we are working harder. Add to this the feeling of nausea and it feels like we are working very hard, even if we aren’t doing any more than usual. I think this explains why the athletes doing yoga in a humid 38C room perceived it to be so difficult.

Fitness is predominantly about what is going on inside the muscles than just whether the heart had to pump faster to keep up with competing demands for blood.

What are the lessons from this for you?

• Don’t intentionally exercise in extremely hot environments unless you are training for some event that will be held in an extremely hot environment.(e.g Hawaii Ironman, a marathon in the Sahara) The added demands it places on the heart and heat loss systems and the potential risk and discomfort aren’t worth it for general fitness.

• Don’t exercise in extra clothing to “heat up” and sweat more. You might weigh less when you finish your exercise, but it will be fluid loss not fat loss and the risk of overheating for no added fitness gain isn’t worth it.

• Try to keep cool while exercising. Your heart and lungs can then focus on getting blood to the working muscles where it is needed. You’ll perform better and feel better, which means you will probably enjoy it more and do it again.

• Don’t believe that just because you feel bad while exercising it is better for you. Exercise should feel a bit uncomfortable while you are doing it but you shouldn’t necessarily feel sick.

• You don’t have to exercise in the heat to be more pliable and elastic. Being in a hot room doesn’t mean the muscles are properly warmed up with adequate blood flow. A gradual warm-up of the muscles you are using is more important than having hot skin and sweating a lot.

• Focus on improving your performance. How you feel and look is important, but they are outcomes of getting fitter.

I’m not just talking about when you don’t get there or get up because you just don’t feel like it; although I know that happens. I’m also talking about when, through no fault of your own, something gets in the way of you doing the exercise you planned to do. It can be frustrating, and in some cases be enough to get you out of your routine for a few days. It doesn’t take much to disrupt an exercise routine and change your mental focus; you miss one day and next thing you know it a week has gone by and you haven’t exercised.

I certainly recommend people stick to their routine as much as possible because we are creatures of habit. If you can’t however, having a Plan B is a good way to keep you mentally focused on getting some exercise in. What do I mean by Plan B? A plan B is an alternative exercise session that you can do when your normal activity isn’t possible. It might not be as strenuous or take as long as your normal exercise but that’s not so important. What is important is to do something so you stay in the habit of exercise.

I have a few Plan B’s, that I call on when my normal routine doesn’t happen. Here are some examples to give you some ideas for your Plan B:

• 15 minutes in the home gym (shed) doing as many different exercises as I can in that time.
• A twenty minute ride around a local park (in my case Kings Park) or any area close to home.
• Walking to the local shops and back (even if I don’t need to buy anything (I don’t recommend this one to my sister who loves to shop!))
• Push-ups, squats, shoulder presses and planks during the ads while I’m watching TV.
• Skipping for 10 minutes in the backyard.

It doesn’t matter what your Plan B is, as long as it gets you doing something and keeps you in the ‘exercise habit’. The law of inertia says that is takes a lot more effort to get something moving than it does to keep it moving. I think it is the same with regular exercise. It’s a lot easier to keep your exercise program going than it is to let it stop and try to get started again. Just doing something, even if it is only for a few minutes, can keep in the habit.
Staying fit is about being consistent; developing an exercise routine that works for you and making it a habit for life. Having a Plan B helps you stay in,or get back into, your routine quicker when other things get in the way.

Your TO DO – come up with four or five Plan B’s that you can use. Write them down and keep them ready for when you miss a session. If you have any great ideas for Plan Bs let me know and I’ll share them with others.

Note: I don’t think there is anything wrong with missing an exercise session. Certainly your fitness won’t fall apart if you miss the occasional workout. Plan B’s are designed to prevent you falling out of routine completely. They are more for your head than they are for your body!

An interesting study I read about recently gives some insight into how investing some money up front might make a difference in the long term.

The economists from the University of California, started from the premise that exercise is a habit; some people have developed the habit and some haven’t. The researchers designed experiments to find out whether financial incentives can help. They recruited 120 students and gave them each a brochure on the benefits of exercise. Forty received just the brochure, 40 received $25 if they went to the (free) gym once the following week and 40 were offered an extra $100 if they went to the gym eight times or more in the next four weeks.

The researchers used attendance records from the gym to compare all 120 students’ gym visits before, during and for seven weeks after the study finished.

The results were quite encouraging. The students who were paid to attend the gym for four weeks not only went during the study, they continued to go after they stopped being paid. They continued to attend about as often as when they were being paid.

The economists concluded that “it may be possible to encourage the formation of good habits by offering monetary compensation for a sufficiently long baseline period, as doing so appears to move some people past the threshold needed to engage in the activity.”

For many people, just feeling good and looking better isn’t enough to develop the habit. This is probably because it takes some time before you start to feel good and look different. Many people give up long before the results start to show up on their waist or in the mirror. Having a financial incentive to keep a person going until the results appear might be the answer many need.

Imagine if governments paid people to attend a gym or exercise regularly for 12 months. By then many would have formed the habit of exercising and continue to do so. The long term savings to the health system would be phenomenal. Given the current pressures and looming crisis in our health systems, it may be one way to reduce the demand for health services.  Continually trying to meet that demand is never going to work.

In Glenn’s latest newsletter he talks about a long term diet study that followed participants on different diets for two years. In summary, what the researchers found was that the average weight loss was about three kilograms over the two years. Not much really, given the enormity of the obesity problem around the world.

At the end of his report on this study Glenn quotes Professor Martijn Katan who states that “We do not need another diet trial, we need a change in paradigm.”

I couldn’t agree more and I think it applies just much to our health system as to weight loss (the two are very much related). Imagine if we changed the focus of the health system from ‘fixing’ people when they get sick to helping them perform better; if we rewarded health professionals for having the fittest patients who used the least medical and hospital resources; if health professionals were paid more for preventive programs; if individuals were rewarded for being fitter and healthier.

I know these comments make it sound simple to fix the huge mess our health system is in. Sometimes the simple suggestion is what is needed. I don’t believe we will ever ‘fix’ the health system with more hospitals and more expensive medical tests. The real answer to the health system bottle-neck is to reduce demand for medical and hospital services. Let’s face it. No one really wants to go to hospital.

We are continually being told that with an ageing population our current health system won’t be able to keep up with demand. All the effort seems to be about increasing the supply of health services to meet the demand. Maybe we should be focusing on reducing demand. We also hear that if health expenditure continues to increase at its current rate it will bankrupt the economy. Another financial crisis! Imagine if the government threw as much money at preventive health initiatives as it has at the looming recession. We wouldn’t need many of the hospitals they keep talking about.

This sounds very idealistic, but major changes in thinking often start with an idealistic viewpoint.

What can you do? Do everything you can to stay as fit and healthy as possible. Keep reading these newsletters for advice and inspiration and subscribe to newsletters like Glenn’s and Julie’s to learn about eating and nutrition. Encourage others to do the same.

Be a role model to the people in your life, especially your family.

A recent research paper in the British Medical Journal reported the findings of a longitudinal study that followed over 2205 men from when they were in their fifties through to their eighties. They examined the relationship between activity and mortality.

In summary, what they found was:

1. There is a dose dependent association between level of physical activity and total mortality in middle aged men. That is, the more active the men were the less their risk of dying.

1. The relative rate reduction attributable to high physical activity was 32% for low and 22% for medium physical activity. If you were in the high activity group you had a 32% less risk of dying compared to the low level activity men.

1. Men who increased their physical activity level between the ages of 50 and 60 continued to have a higher mortality rate during the first five years of follow-up. After 10 years of follow-up their increased physical activity was associated with reduced mortality to the level of men with unchanged high physical activity. That is, their risk of dying was equivalent to those men who had been active all their life.

1. The reduction in mortality associated with increased physical activity was similar to that associated with quitting smoking. Imagine if society had placed as much emphasis on getting people exercising and fitter as it has on getting them to stop smoking.

Like all research, you have to be careful assuming that this will apply to everyone, other than Swedish middle-aged men, but I believe if this study could be repeated with different population groups, the findings would be similar.

It is also worth noting that activity levels were determined based on a self-assessment. In my experience, most people over-estimate how active they are, so if you genuinely exercise regularly at a fairly high intensity, you may have an even lower risk than those in this study.

Strength training and high intensity interval training for older adults is relatively new advice, so it will be interesting to see how this compares in reducing mortality with aerobic exercise and just being generally active. I believe it will be found to be just as or even more beneficial, especially in older age groups.

What does all this mean?

• The more active (fitter) you are, the less your risk of dying prematurely.
• It’s never too late to start an exercise program to reduce your risk of dying early.
• Getting fitter reduces your risk as much as quitting smoking. (Imagine if we could get an anti-unfitness lobby going!)

While these may enhance performance, they don’t replace the need to do the work required to get and stay fit. Even the Tour de France cyclists, who used drugs to improve their performance, had to work extremely hard to get the results they did. (It’s not easy getting thrown out of the race or off your own team).

Supplements to boost growth hormone are commonly marketed to stave off the effects of ageing. However, without doubt the best way to boost your own production of human growth hormone is exercise, specifically strength training.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina found that compared to a 30 minute aerobic training session, a strength training workout resulted in significantly more growth hormone release.

And the good news is that you don’t need to do a lot of strength training to give your Growth Hormone a boost.

The best types of exercises to boost growth hormone are compound or multi-muscle exercises such as squats. These can be done with just your own body weight or using extra weights such as dumbbells in your hands. A good upper body exercise to do with the squats is push-ups, or bench press if you have weights. These both use a number of upper body muscles.

Doing just 3 sets of 8 repetitions two to three times per week gives you a fast, whole body workout that builds muscle, burns fat, and boosts growth hormone. Add this to some regular aerobic exercise and you have a great fitness program that doesn’t take up too much time.