The Best Exercise Advice You’ll Ever Hear

Never, ever exercise strenuously for a period longer than half an hour.

If you are playing tennis, or doing something similar, you are not going full-out for any length of time and you are taking breaks. Thus, this is not strenuous exercise for a long period, though you still must hydrate, replenish your electrolytes, and burn fuel (carb, fat, or protein), while fighting off oxidation and inflammation (see below).

Same with a professional football player: the game can last three hours (with commercials) but the actual action of any game is around eleven minutes. It’s the practices that kill football players. In practices they perform actual endurance training. And this takes its toll on their cardiovascular system, while the games take their toll on their bones and tissues.

I’m talking heavy continuous exercise for no more than half an hour.

After half an hour of strenuous exercise, you are doing endurance training.

There are only three types of people who should ever do endurance training:

1. Soldiers
2. Marathon Runners (but quit at age 25)
3. Hunters on the plains of Africa who must run down their prey.

If you exercise longer than half an hour, you are causing damage to your body. Sure, you might look like a Greek God or Goddess on the outside, but your arteries are aging fast and building plaque. Your cortisol levels go off the chart and you experience adrenal overload.

I laughed out loud when someone sent me an article from Mercola saying, “New Study Shows Cardio Workout May Damage Your Heart.”

Do we really need a new study to learn the obvious? When I began research on our book, Bypassing Bypass (currently being rewritten), I learned right away that “cardio isn’t.” This was a saying that stayed in my head during the whole process of producing the book: “Cardio isn’t.”

Cardio is called cardio because it’s supposed to be good for the heart.

Cardio is NOT good for the heart IF you do it longer than 30 minutes or do not prepare (with proper nutrition) for it in the first place.

• Brian Maxwell, inventor of the “carb bar,” and ranked the number 3 marathon runner in the world by Track and Field News, died of a heart attack at 51.
• Jim Fixx authored the book, The Complete Book of Running, dead at 52.
• Chuck Hughes, football player, died on the field at 28, his arteries 77% clogged.
• Frank Pallien collapsed while jogging on the Lackawanna Heritage Valley Trail; dead at 51 of a heart attack.

Who is Frank Pallien? He’s a nobody actually; just like you and me. You don’t have to be famous to die out jogging. People drop dead everyday jogging.

Our bodies were not meant to do endurance training, and if you are a marathon runner and quit at age 25, you can spend the next fifteen to twenty years working to reverse the damage you’ve done already.

When we work out we need energy, either from fat, protein, or carbohydrates. We need antioxidants. We’re using a lot of oxygen, so you can bet we are oxidizing (antioxidants prevent oxidation). And we are building inflammation, so we need anti-inflammatories. 

The problem is: you cannot stock up on enough of these prior to your workout. After half an hour, you’ve pretty much used up any supplements you’ve take prior to your workout.

Sure, there are things like Ecklonia Cava Extract, which will work for hours, but they’ve never been tested in endurance training. Your vitamin C is definitely used up in half an hour. Omega-3s? Omega-7s? Again, not tested in endurance training.

Sure, football players make the big bucks, but when they retire, they are basically crippled for the rest of their lives and not just from the obvious injuries on the field.

When you exercise, you must

• Keep yourself hydrated
• Make sure you have enough fuel to burn to feed your muscles
• Replenish your electrolytes

And there is no reason for most of us to exercise longer than 30 minutes.

What Kind of Exercise Is Best?

From one of our newsletters, I give you this:

A group of 22 women were broken up into three groups. One group did nothing; they were the control.

The other two groups exercised four times a week for four weeks.

However, the two groups did different exercises.

Group A did a half hour of jogging on a treadmill at 85% their maximum heart rate.

Group B did 8 rounds of 20 seconds of a single exercise at high intensity (burpees, jumping  jacks, mountain climbers, or squat thrusts) with 10 seconds of rest between rounds.  (4 minute total workouts.)

Have you got that? One group worked out for half an hour while the other did “intense” exercises for just four minutes.

Their findings? Both groups got the same benefits. They both increased their “aerobic” fitness levels by the same amount (7 to 8%).

HOWEVER, the group doing the 4 minute workout also increased their muscular endurance and experienced an overall workout enjoyment level not seen by the half hour joggers.

You can get all the exercise you need, if you do it right.

Here are the four best exercises you can do:

1. walking
2. interval training 
3. metabolic resistance training
4. high intensity weight lifting

Walking is something you can do for more than 30 minutes, though at just the thirty minute level, studies show that this lights up the pleasure center of the brain and brings on a feeling of contentment.

Interval training comes in many packages that you can learn on the web, but most people will try to sell you something on it, so here is a link to the physician who is a pioneer in the subject and who started it all. By the way, I enjoy doing bursts, and I do them for only 10 and a half minutes.

Metabolic Resistance Training can definitely be learned on the web, especially at YouTube. Don’t pay someone $50 for a crappy e-book that gives you nothing more than you can find on YouTube for free.

High Intensity Weight Lifting is something else I do. It releases human growth hormone very quickly, it’s strenuous as hell, and I’m done in under 30 minutes, having worked on ALL the muscle groups. On some days, however, I will take a break (in the sauna) and come back and do 30 more minutes.

And prior to exercise, I take 6 g vitamin C (complex), resveratrol, ECE, Flexinol, magnesium, vitamin D, pycnogenol, l-arginine, and vitamin E (mixed tochopherols/mixed tocotrienols), all found at out best affiliate program, Swanson Health. I drink 12 oz of Perrier water (for the bicarbonate) prior to exercise, and during and after exercise, I drink coconut water.

Please. Never exercise strenuously longer than thirty minutes, that is, unless you want to make a beautiful corpse.

Further Reading

Electrolytes 

Benefits of Coconut Water 

Coconut Water: A New Health Drink 

Dr Bruce Fife’s book: Coconut Water

Dr Sears Pace Program 

Celebrity Fitness Trainer Dead at 42