The Power of Fastercise by Denis Wilson

Author:Denis Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

CHAPTER 7

The Physiology of Fastercise

Imagine that your house is right at the foot of a big hill. Every time there’s a heavy rain, a mudslide happens and you have to spend hours raking and shoveling your yard to clean up the mess. A better solution might be to build an embankment to prevent the mud from coming into your yard in the first place! Trying to exercise your way out of bad eating habits is like cleaning up the mud every time it rains, because it takes so much exercise time to burn a significant amount of calories. Fortunately, though, you can fastercise your way into healthy eating habits, which is like building that embankment to protect your body from excess fat accumulation. This chapter dives into the physiology of exercise and fastercise to explain how this works at the cellular level.

We can think of fastercise as exercising not only our muscles but also our hormones, hormone sensitivity, cytosolic pathways, and mitochondria. In fact, our real purpose in exercising our muscles is to exercise our metabolisms. Nevertheless, focusing on the type and timing of exercise to influence hormone levels, pathway activity, and fuel sources can generate amazing results in the strength and appearance of our muscles with a remarkably small investment of time and effort. Timing may not be everything, but it can make a huge difference.

Let’s start by making a distinction between low-intensity exercise and high-intensity exercise. Cycling or running on a treadmill are good examples of low-intensity exercise, which I also refer to as steady-state or continuous exercise. They require effort, and you may find yourself sweating and breathing fast, but you can keep up that effort continuously for an extended period of time (more than ten minutes), and without having to take deep, gasping breaths. High-intensity exercise is so intense that you won’t be able to sustain the effort for more than a few minutes, and it may require deep breathing.

My understanding of the physiology of fastercise is based on research on the effects of high-intensity exercise on the body. High-intensity exercise has become very popular recently and is discussed in many books and exercise programs. Fastercise is similar to these programs in that it involves intense muscle activity done in short bursts. Fastercise is unique, however, because it is the first exercise program to time exercise and meals according to appetite in order to signal hormonal pathways to burn stored fat while preserving and building muscle.

Exercise causes immediate physiological changes as well as adaptations in our bodies (metabolic, cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological) over time. The adaptations include changes in the concentrations of the enzymes that catalyze the energy-producing pathways, the number and size of our mitochondria, our fuel storage compartments, and how well we access and burn our stored fuel. Exercise can also change our body composition, strength, and appearance.

The more out of shape we are, the more our bodies respond to exercise. For example, epinephrine levels and growth hormone (GH) levels increase (up to six times more for GH) in response to exercise in untrained people compared to trained people.

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