what are the most important types of exercise that you can do for your overall health Fitness and Longevity and is there even a real answer to this is there really this most important type of exercise because people may have different fitness goals different sports they may like to play and may have various strengths and weaknesses that need to be addressed based on age genetics and previous experience with exercise well there actually kind of is an answer to this because there are Fitness parameters and physiological adaptations that you could argue almost everyone should be trying to achieve and one of the beauties of exercise is that we can tailor or tweak pretty much anyone's exercise program in order to stimulate the development of these important physiological adaptations that would allow you to gain many different health benefits and yet still allow you to focus on physical activities or sports that you enjoy doing the most so let's get into the lab here and take a look at how we can accomplish this anatomical and physiological awesomeness and special thanks to let's get checked for sponsoring today's video now what we are going to find is that there are three or four principles or pillars of exercise that we need to focus on and to warm us up for those let me talk about some of the wise of exercise and the physiological adaptations that we are going for most of the time when we think about exercise we think about its effects on skeletal muscles and even the heart and probably even its relationship to burning fat or losing weight your muscles can greatly adapt to exercise through either getting larger and stronger as well as developing more mitochondria in certain muscle fibers thereby increasing muscular endurance exercise can even increase the number of capillaries that deliver blood to the skeletal muscles which would make the muscles more efficient with the exchange of nutrients and metabolic byproducts the heart muscle also gets stronger and more efficient at pumping more blood with each beat and the mitochondria within the heart muscle cells will also increase in number and size but the benefits of exercise don't just end with the heart and skeletal muscles it also EX tends to strengthening your bones you literally have bone cells called osteoblast that will lay down more bone tissue due to the stimulus that exercise provides which can lead to increased bone density and as a super cool FYI if you've ever seen spongy bone which is the bone tissue that's deep within your bones you might have seen these little beams called tabic and these little beams might seem randomly oriented but oh no that is not the case your bone cells build those beams in a specific orientation along the lines of stress that the bones experience which helps the bones to resist these stresses and transfer forces with outbreaking you also increase your metabolic efficiency with consistent exercise and a big part of that has to do with the development of mitochondria that I previously mentioned and this increased metabolic efficiency helps to ensure that your body properly utilizes macronutrients such as carbohydrates proteins and fats and as you could imagine these adaptations can reduce your risk of all sorts of different conditions some big ones being reducing the risk of developing diabetes improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol which would reduce your risk of coronary artery disease and even reducing the risk of certain bone conditions such as osteoporosis there are also various mental health benefits that are associated with exercise decreases in stress anxiety depression and improved mental resilience so now that I've geeked out on some of these physiological adaptations and many of the health benefits how do apply this to our lives or in other words what exercises or types of exercise do we need to choose in order to reap all of these benefits well as I mentioned earlier there are pretty much three or four overall exercise principles that can be applied to everyone you want to incorporate forms of exercise that one improve strength two improve cardiovascular efficiency three improve mobility and the fourth isn't technically an exercise principle but it would be monitoring your progress so how do we incorporate these exercise principles into our routines a little bit later on in the video we're going to talk about the importance of Health maintenance and even monitoring our progress one of the ways we can monitor our progress is through testing and that's why I want to take a quick second to say thank you to the sponsor of today's video let's get checked let's get checked is a virtual care company that helps people manage their health from home and one of the ways they do this is by sending you a test kit once you receive the test kit you gather the specimen at your house ship it back to them with a provided prepaid shipping shipping label and they send you the results in approximately 2 to 5 business days let's get checked offers a variety of different tests but one of the tests they are currently promoting is their colon cancer screening test this is an easy non-invasive screening test that looks for hidden blood in the stool which can be one of the signs of cancerous or pre-cancerous growths in the colon and could require further investigation colon cancer often has no symptoms in the early stages but this is when it is the most treatable so this is why early and regular colon cancer screenings are so important now most screening guidelines recommend colon cancer screening for those that are 45 and older let's get checked has many other health maintenance tests that you can take a look at like tests related to heart health kidney function tests and even STI testing so if you're interested visit the link in the description and use our coupon code ioha 25 to get 25% off your tests we'll also include that information in the description below so here's what's so great about these three exercise principles strength cardiovascular efficiency and Mobility you can Target those with all sorts of different exercise choices Sports and activities and some people depending on their goals and interests will easily hit at least one or two of those principles naturally like someone that enjoys weightlifting would obviously check the strength box someone that loves hiking cycling or running would check that cardiovascular efficiency box and a dancer or a martial artist would definitely be checking that Mobility box so what we need to do is just sprinkle in or add in some of those exercise principles that you may not naturally hit as well during your activities or exercises of choice but let me continue to paint a little bit more of this overall picture say like I have someone that isn't really into a specific sport or doesn't necessarily gravitate towards a specific exercise I often have this conversation with my patients during their annual physical they say something like I don't have a particular sport or type of exercise I like more than the rest just give me a plan that is best for my overall health and wellness and so then we usually start with a plan or at least a baseline that looks something like this maybe Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays we designate those as resistance training days where the focus is on maintaining and gaining strength and if the person wants to increase muscular size we can tweak some of the loads rep schemes and volume to accommodate for that and we may do an upper lower body split where Monday is an upper body day Wednesday is lower body then Friday is back to Upper and then the following week Monday becomes lower Wednesday upper and Friday is low so you get this even alternation of upper body resistance training versus lower body resistance training then on Tuesdays Thursdays and Saturdays we could designate those as cardio days maybe on Tuesdays and Thursdays we designate those as more of a steadystate cardio day pushing that upper limit of zone two which would be an intensity where you are just on the cusp of not being able to hold a full conversation or about 60 to 70% of your max heart rate and again I like to push to the upper end of that then on Saturday we may warm up a little bit with some steady state but then we really push into that higher intensity interval type cardio where we're pushing V2 Max and could do something like 4x4s four minutes on of an high-intensity cardio then four minutes of rest and you do that sequence for a total of four times and then during the cool down after many of these exercise sessions we do some Mobility training where we incorporate some static stretching and I also like to incorporate a few full range of motion exercises during strength training days I may have someone do some full range squats these don't have to be like like crazy loads but a few full range of motion squats maybe during the warm-up that makes them go through that full range of motion also maybe some romanium deadlifts for the hamstrings and maybe even some deep lunges for those hip flexors with the idea of getting the muscles used to Contracting and developing some strength in those lengthened positions that you wouldn't get alone just by doing static stretching so again let's come back and apply this to the person that focuses mostly on resist distance training throw in a few sessions of cardio during your week as well as some Mobility sessions because yes strength training has huge benefits but it isn't as effective as cardiovascular training is for improving cardiovascular and metabolic markers such as blood pressure cholesterol and blood glucose levels the person that mostly focuses on cycling or running or other forms of cardio throw in a strength training session each week and again some Mobility sessions and what is interesting about this is that Main maintaining strength only requires about 10 to 15 sets per muscle group per week which actually isn't that much especially if you talk to the powerlifters and the bodybuilders and if you do this with compound movements which would be movements that involve multiple joints and muscle groups you can do this with even more efficiency and just in case this is your first time hearing this compound movements again would involve lifts or exercises that involve multiple joints with some examples being Squat and deadlift variations push-up bench press and pull-up variations and the load needs to be heavy relative to you a weight that you may only be able to lift about four to eight times again getting close to that 10 total sets per muscle group per week maintaining strength is so important for maintaining fast twitch muscle fibers the fast twitch fibers are the fibers that tend to be the first to atrophy with aging but they typically don't get engaged much with steady state cardio and during activities of daily living so again this is why someone that gravitates towards endurance type activities should try to incorporate some relatively heavy resistance training throughout the week to maintain those fast twitch fibers and resistance training has a positive impact on bone density often people think you have to have high impact activities to improve bone density but this is not the only way to do it as your muscles contract they Yank on the bones that they are attached to through their tendons which stimulates those cool bone cells that we talked about earlier called osteoblast to help maintain the bone density now I did also mention dancers and martial artists and these same principles would apply to them but many dancers and martial artists actually do stimulate many of their fast twitch muscle fibers through explosive movements like jumping or hand and foot speed drills but it still could be beneficial to throw in some resistance training throughout the week and depending on how much cardio they're actually getting in their sport you could add any extra cardiovascular days as necessary but let's finish up with monitoring our progress I think it's good practice for people to monitor their progress through annual physicals whether this is through a virtual care company like let's get checked or your own primary care provider you want to at least check the basics like cholesterol metabolic markers blood counts blood pressure heart rate and of course managing any conditions that you may be dealing with but what I think is really nice is that you can monitor a lot of your Fitness progress at home one of the most basic things you can do is monitor your resting heart rate and this is especially a good indicator of improved cardiovascular efficiency if say after working on a cardiovascular exercise routine for a few months your resting heart rate goes down from say like 65 beats per minute to 58 beats per minute that is an indicator that your heart is stronger and it needs fewer beats per minute to pump the same volume of blood that it did when you were less fit and if it were up to me I would also have people monitor their own blood pressure from their home you can buy a blood pressure monitor on Amazon for like 40 to 50 bucks and we also allow our patients to come into our Clinic with their blood pressure monitor to compare it to ours to make sure it's calibrated correctly cor ly so that people are getting accurate and consistent numbers for blood pressure you want it to be below 120 over 80 and one little last note on resting heart rate technically in the medical world we say a normal resting heart rate is 60 to 100 beats per minute but in general I like my patients that are more concerned about their Fitness to shoot for a resting heart rate below 60 beats per minute so thanks for watching and supporting our Channel earlier in this video I mentioned things about bone health and bone density as well as things about like Zone 2 training in steady state cardio we have some other videos that are more detailed about those topics that I'll link on screen here and please leave us a comment let us know what you thought of the video and we'll see you soon