Anaerobic Exercises: What Are The Benefits?
Before embarking on a training plan, you need to have some sort of clarity on what it is you want to achieve or maintain. If you want to lose weight, aerobics will work. However, if you want to increase your strength and power, you should try anaerobic exercises.
What are anaerobic exercises?
During exercise, the muscles work. And as we know, all work requires energy. In this particular case, anaerobic exercises are exercises of high intensity and short duration that require a powerful and fast source of fuel from the body.
This fuel is present in immediate sources: Muscle ATP (also called energy currency), creatine phosphate (PT) and glucose.
Anaerobic exercises are often mixed with aerobics. For example, while walking, you can do a sprint or run fast between 0 seconds and a minute, and then continue walking while gathering energy.
The time for explosive action, which characterizes static, strength or anaerobic exercises, ranges from one minute to 120 seconds.
When you do this, you activate two energy mechanisms. For the first ten seconds, the body uses creatine phosphate, especially for short-term and very high-intensity exercises. When time is extended, the body uses glucose as an energy substrate that generates lactic acid.
If you prolong this practice – from 20 to 120 seconds – lactic acid is formed, which makes you exhausted.
What are the benefits of anaerobic exercises?
Although there are many benefits to dynamic exercises, muscle strength and power increase when you regularly practice static training. It also improves your endurance and basal metabolism.
On the other hand, a good walk gives you instant benefits, but the results of anaerobic exercises require time and endurance. In fact, you will only start noticing it after three months or more.
Disease prevention
Anaerobic exercises strengthen the immune system and help prevent diseases such as type 2 diabetes. They also reduce cardiovascular disease, arthritis and back pain.
Development and strengthening of muscle mass and bones
Weightlifting with dumbbells or other things is used to increase muscle mass. Weightlifting involves the muscles and bones, so anaerobic exercises increase bone density, reducing the risk of osteoporosis.
It is important to pay attention to the weight you can lift depending on the type of exercise to avoid injury.
Better quality of life
Anaerobic exercises strengthen the musculoskeletal structure, which leads to a better balance in movement, greater self-confidence and independence in daily activities.
The strength developed by anaerobic exercises is transformed into vitality and optimism to meet the daily challenges.
Increased metabolism
Experts recommend aerobic exercises for weight loss, with anaerobic exercises, by increasing muscle mass, contribute very well to this purpose.
By rebuilding muscle, anaerobic exercises reduce the amount of fat, resulting in a relative weight loss. In other words, aerobic exercise burns lipids, and anaerobic exercises increase lean fat.
This contributes to a faster metabolism, that is, in the amount of energy that your body needs for the vital functions.
The factor that is most related to low metabolism is lean body mass. You achieve this by weightlifting, which reinforces the hypothesis that this type of exercise is useful for treating obesity.
Increased endurance and strength
Anaerobic exercises are made to build endurance. There comes a time during training when arms and legs can no longer. This happens when the level of blood lactate rises to a level that the body cannot get rid of right away. This leads to the muscles acidifying, fatigue and loss of performance.
Increasingly, extending the threshold is part of anaerobic training in athletic endurance training. And among the routines is strength training, which works the slowly pulling muscles. This takes work away from the slow fibers, which are the ones that accumulate more lactate.
Examples of anaerobic exercises
There are two types of strength or static exercises. Isometric when there is a sustained muscle contraction against a fixed resistance (eg a wall) and isotonic when muscle contraction can overcome the resistance (lifting a weight):
Tips for performing anaerobic exercises
First, you should not start on anaerobic routines without a medical check-up, especially if you are suffering from an illness. If you are both a beginner and overweight, you should not do anaerobic exercises. The same is true if you are pregnant.
Before you begin, either warm up or do cardio, where physical activity gradually increases. This results in the removal of lactic acid, which increases heart rate and blood flow and prevents stiffness.
Similarly, aerobic exercises should include stretching that will prepare the body for the anaerobic exercises.
These are also strength exercises. This means that we recommend excluding complicated movements in the beginning and letting yourself gain experience to gradually increase the degree of difficulty.
Anaerobic exercises require professional attention
Anaerobic exercises are very demanding and if you do not take the necessary precautions, it can cause injuries. For example, it is important to know that there is an anaerobic threshold. It is the maximum training intensity that you can expose your body to without becoming extremely exhausted.
Exercising above this threshold will depend on many factors: the type of exercises, muscle composition, diet and environment. Overall, the body needs to get used to different levels that you can handle without any problems below this threshold.
It requires professional training and and supervision to go over this threshold, sometimes for the purpose of practicing high-performance sports.
