Aerobic exercise is finding its way back into the mainstream as consumers continue to find weight lifting a bit too complicated and dangerous to engage in without a fitness professional. Americans love to exercise on their own accord, and aerobics affords them that autonomy even though there are safety guidelines to every exercise. The explosion of home fitness DVD’s with celebrity trainers endorsing their latest regimen have merged aerobic and anaerobic techniques — and for good reason.
According to Health Day, a study finds that aerobic exercise alone helps remove the stubborn belly fat, which has become the signifier of less-than-optimal health in today’s culture. Joggers and swimmers can rejoice in this study that once again proves Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion: the velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force; in other words, if one moves around, regardless of the exercise, one will see some result — and according to this study, if one moves consistently and hard enough, one will lose a lot of weight.
Either way, this report — which was an eight-month study that compared the effectiveness of aerobic exercise (such as jogging), resistance training (such as weight lifting), or a combination of the two activities in 196 overweight, sedentary adults aged 18 to 70 — should jump start people to just start walking, at least, because exercise helps mask the debilitating effects of the Standard American Diet (S.A.D), which seems here to stay.
The Duke Medical Center, which put together this far from groundbreaking but undoubtedly helpful research, concluded that aerobic exercise significantly reduced visceral fat — which is the fat that accumulates deep within the abdomen, permeating in between organs and placing tremendous pressure on one’s liver.
Resistance training is great for improving strength and increasing lean body mass,” lead author and exercise physiologist Cris Slentz said in a Duke news release. “But if you are overweight, which two-thirds of the population is, and you want to lose belly fat, aerobic exercise is the better choice because it burns more calories.
Considering that most blacks are overweight and vitamin D deficient, walking outside for 20 – 30 minutes a day will help one strengthen her/his bones, lose weight, and receive an essential vitamin without supplementation in the form of pills or milk.