When I left my internship in 1969, I went to the Air Force Flight Medical Officer’s training program in San Antonio, Texas – in August. Another Air Force doctor was also in San Antonio – Dr. Kenneth Cooper. He was training astronauts – and Air Force personnel – using the aerobics program – aka cardiovascular exercise.

At the “suggestion” of the company commander, I was supposed to run 1 ½ miles every day. At 235 pounds, I was not prepared for this. In the August heat, I ran out a 1/4 mile and crawled back a 1/4 mile. I thought I would die. At the end of eight weeks of Flight Medical Officer School I was running 5 miles a day and had dropped 40 pounds.

Cardiovascular exercise – the fourth type of exercise in our series – is specifically designed to improve the work efficiency of the heart and lungs, i.e. improve the ability of the body to take in oxygen and get it around to all parts of the body – thus the name “aerobics.”

Do you remember those long nights studying for tough exams?  Remember how good it felt to stretch, arms overhead, fingers interlocked? It turns out that stretching is one of the four types of exercises essential for a good workout.

Stretching, like all other types of exercise, relaxes the body and the mind, helps you lose weight, improves metabolism and increases blood flow. But stretching also does something that other exercises do not do. Stretching protects. Stretching s-l-o-w-l-y challenges and gently strengthens the connections between the muscle and the joint cartilage where it attaches – the connective tissue. These connections are vulnerable to small tears when stretched rapidly and can be very painful (imagine twisted ankles or plantar fasciitis). Once damaged, connective tissue can take a long time to heal (as long as a fracture – 6 weeks). This can be avoided by stretching before you exercise.  

“Exercise – how do I do that?”

Many people think exercise means a basketball game or mowing the lawn once a week – or a strenuous workout on Sunday followed by several days of regret. Back in the nineteenth century exercise was how you lived your life. Every activity of daily living required fairly strenuous and continuous exercise. But in our modern society of convenience and technology, exercise has to be planned into daily life.

In review – there are four basic exercise modes – cardiovascular, stretching, strength training and balance.  Our last health article discussed strength training, especially for the arms and legs. Now we're talking about balance and the core muscles.

Magazines of all kinds are full of articles about exercise. They proclaim its fantastic benefits – weight loss, relaxation, controlling blood sugar, lower bad fats and increasing good fats, more efficient immune systems, increased bone density and muscle strength, better sleep efficiency.

But too often everyone talks about exercising and never does anything about it. It seems that those who need exercise the most are the ones least likely to do it.

So here is a four part series on exercise – what to do and how to do it. Not in detail; plenty of articles outline the specifics. Just a reminder of the basic rules for each kind of exercise.

There are four basic exercise modes: