• Your Personal Exercise Program

Your physician and health care team will help you choose an exercise program that is best for you. They will tell you about two types of exercise, aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic exercise is exercise that uses oxygen to help create energy for your muscles. This type of exercise increases the efficiency of your heart, muscles, lungs, and blood vessels. These conditioning effects, however, depend on exercising often enough, hard enough, and for long enough. Good examples of aerobic exercise are walking and bicycling, swimming, and running. Racquetball, paced calisthenics, and tennis are good examples of more active aerobic exercise.
Anerobic exercise is exercise in which your muscles can achieve great bursts of energy that are not immediately dependent on available oxygen but will soon go into oxygen debt. Additionally, chemical by-products of the substances broken down for energy can pool up in your muscles and cause fatigue. While this type of exercise may stress the muscles used, it will not condition your cardiovascular system. A good example of anerobic exercise is running for a bus, when you exert yourself in an all out effort and feel out of breath when you climb aboard. What happens is that you have used up oxygen at a faster rate than you took it in, resulting in oxygen debt. This is in contrast to regular jogging, an aerobic exercise, during which your use of oxygen does not exceed your intake.
You will probably want to concentrate on aerobic exercise to condition your cardiovascular system. In time aerobic exercise can decrease your resting and exercise heart rates, which means that your heart works less hard to do its job. To reach this point, however, you must exercise at least three times per week, or every other day. If you exercise less often than this, you will not actually be conditioning your body. In fact, the weekend athlete is more likely to strain a muscle or in cure some injury than achieve any good effect. Also, if you have been regularly exercising aerobically and you suddenly decrease your exercise schedule to fewer than three times a week, you will lose whatever benefits you have gained. Exercise must be a regular activity to produce any benefit.

The next factor involved in aerobic conditioning is effort, how hard you push yourself. In order to achieve cardiovascular conditioning some physicians say you must perform at 70-85 percent of your maximum heart rate. There are two ways to find your maximum heart rate. One way is simply to push yourself to the limit and record your pulse until it goes no higher. If you are middle-aged, your doctor may suggest that you do just this, under supervision, of course, in an exercise stress test. In an exercise stress test you run on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bike until electrocardiogram will show the tester how you are reacting to the stress. An easier way to obtain your approximate maximum heart rate is to subtract your age from 220. For example, if you are 40 years old, your maximum heart rate would be 220-40=180. If you exceed 85 percent of this maximal heart rate you may actually harm yourself, while if you exercise at much less than 70 percent of this maximal heart rate, the exercise is probably not effective in developing cardiovascular fitness.