Aerobic exercise is

It is an endurance exercise carried out by the human body when the oxygen supply is sufficient. The energy supply mainly comes from the aerobic oxidation process of glycogen and fat in the body. Under typical conditions, the heart rate will be maintained in the range of 60%-80% of the individual's maximum heart rate, and the duration is usually more than 15 minutes. Fast walking, jogging, long-distance swimming, medium-speed cycling, and low-intensity aerobics are our most common aerobic events.

Many people's understanding of aerobic is stuck in the dead end of "should the heart rate be stuck?" When I first got into fitness two years ago, I was instilled by a personal trainer with the concept that "you must run with a heart rate of 130 for 40 minutes to be considered effective aerobic." During that time, every time I ran, I would stare at my watch and my heart rate would slow down if it was slightly higher.

Later, when I came into contact with different viewpoints, I realized that there is no unified rigid standard for the definition of aerobic in the sports world. Researchers who follow the hard-core academic route prefer to use laboratory data such as oxygen uptake and respiratory quotient to speak. They believe that only when the oxygen uptake reaches 40%-60% of the individual's maximum oxygen uptake and the respiratory quotient is stable between 0.7-0.9, that is, when the proportion of fat energy supply is not less than 30%, it can be regarded as aerobic exercise in the strict sense. This standard is mostly used to guide athletes in competition preparation and patient recovery.

Another group of scholars who work on mass sports science believe that there is no need to be so harsh. For office workers who usually sit for 8 hours a day, they can walk around the community for 20 minutes after work, follow short videos for 15 minutes while cooking, and even take one less elevator every day. Climbing stairs, as long as you breathe a little faster than usual when you move, and you can speak normally but cannot sing happily, this low-intensity activity is considered light aerobic. If you persist for a long time, it will improve your cardiopulmonary function and prevent chronic diseases, which is no worse than running for half an hour. But having said that, if you have the need to prepare for a marathon and adjust your body fat rate in a short period of time, it will indeed be more efficient to arrange training with reference to hard-core indicators. After all, different needs match different standards, and there is no right or wrong.

My best friend had high blood lipids during her physical examination last year. The doctor asked her to do aerobics, but she would get breathless after running even two steps. So she took her mother to the vegetable market every day after dinner, and walked back and forth for 40 minutes in total. Half a year later, the blood lipid index was back to the normal range. She even said, "I didn't even feel that I was exercising, so I just stopped by to buy groceries and chat every day, which also saved me the money to go to the gym."

There are a lot of aerobic misunderstandings. The most common one is "you must exercise for more than 30 minutes to burn fat." To be honest, I believed this myth before. Every time I run, I will take two to three minutes to half an hour. Even if I am exhausted, I still have to hold on. Later, I checked the exercise physiology Only from the data did we know that fat has already participated in energy supply from the first minute of your exercise. The so-called "fat energy supply ratio increases after 30 minutes" is just a change in the proportion. It does not mean that fat is not burned at all in the first half hour. There is no need to carry it hard to make time, but it is easy to get injured.

In fact, for ordinary people, there is really no need to worry about "whether what I do is considered aerobic." You can choose an activity that you can persist in and make your body comfortable and not uncomfortable after the exercise. Do it three or four days a week and exercise for more than 20 minutes each time. It is much more cost-effective than just sticking to the target. After all, the purpose of exercise is to make the body more comfortable, not to collect data to complete KPIs, right?