Gettit #4: What we’ve learned about exercise is wrong.  Less may be more . . . as in 6 minutes a day!

With all of the twists and turns, one of the most confusing factors has been consideration of exercise volume.  We look at athletes and their excessive training loads and that leads to the assumption that the more you do, the more fit you become.  Athletes have not only developed their performance ability, but they’ve also developed their recuperative powers, and they don’t take recuperation lightly.  Their nutrition, rest, and sleep are vital parts of their training regimens.

Whether or not you achieve positive change from an exercise and eating regimen comes down to a complex balance between load and recovery, between “work” and “recuperation.”  One of the elements of this balance that has been too-long neglected in conventional exercise circles is the parasympathetic recovery system.  The adrenal system, the glandular system that causes that fight or flight stir we’ve become familiar with works to prepare the body for action, but when there is no longer need for stimulation, the parasympathetic system helps the body to recover, to return to a state of relaxation.  The parasympathetic system can be trained to allow for better recovery, and science links improvements in recovery with decreases in inflammation.  The bottom line is this . . . I’ve been leading people to do six-minute aerobic sessions with 12-second all-out bursts and their improvements in body composition and health have been astounding.

I’m not suggesting that six minutes a day will be all anyone needs for improvement, but a twenty minute resistance training routine, moving the body through space the way the body was designed to move, combined with six minutes of aerobic exercise staggering sympathetic response with parasympathetic recovery is the underlying foundation of my A.L.I.V.E. protocol.  Most people are shocked by how little the exercise volume is and how the results prove for superior to those results they achieved with greater volume.

Click here for Gettit #5 or download the entire piece as a pdf