Cellulite Therapies

Common fitness knowledge says that both walking and running will burn the same number of calories per mile. I am not quite sure where this piece of information first showed up or why it persists today, but I hope to clarify some of the confusion in this article.

Walking and running are perhaps the two most basic and leading forms of human movement. Every able bodied human can walk and run and learned to do so without any formalized training. Compare this to other activities, such as biking, swimming or swinging a golf club, which require more training in order to perform those movements correctly. This is one of the main reasons that walking and running are two of the best ways to get in shape and improve your overall health.

The logic for both walking and running a mile burning the same amount of calories makes sense. You cover the same distance so it should require the same amount of energy, right? Not necessarily. Calorie burning is usually closely related to the amount of oxygen you consume. When you are performing continuous exercise you burn about five calories for every liter of oxygen that you consume. Running generally requires significantly more oxygen than walking, even over the same distance.

In a paper titled “Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running”, which was published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 meters on a treadmill. The results of the study showed the following:

The men burned an average of 124 calories while running, and 88 while walking.

The women burned 105 and 74.

The men ended up burning more calories due to the fact that they were larger and had more muscle mass.

After looking at these results (running burned about 50% more calories than walking) you have to ask why there is such a calorie burning disparity between the two activities. When you walk your center of gravity rides along fairly smoothly with very little vertical movement. If you were to put a pen on your shoulder and walk along a wall, the mark left by the pen would be pretty straight.

Running is actually the act of taking a whole bunch of little jumps in a row. You are actually jumping from one foot to the other. Each jump raises and then lowers your center of gravity. If we were to trace the path of your torso there would be a lot of vertical movement. This continual rise and fall of your weight requires a tremendous amount of additional effort above and beyond the demands of walking the same distance.

One important point from this discussion is the fact that there is a difference between the total number of calories burned and the net number of calories burned. Net calories burned are figured by subtracting the baseline number of calories you burn from the total number of calories burned. Baseline calories are how many calories your body burns just existing. So if you burn 200 calories in a treadmill workout and your baseline metabolism for the same amount of time is 50 calories, your net calorie burn is 150 calories. This is am important point to remember when calculating calories burned or else you can end up with a grossly inflated calorie figure.

The study mentioned above calculated the net calorie burn of running a mile in 9:30 versus walking a mile in 19:00. The men burned 105 calories running and 52 walking. The women burned 91 running and 43 walking. That is, running burns twice as many net calories per mile as walking. And since you can run two miles in the time it takes to walk one mile, running burns four times as many net calories per hour as walking.

This article is not intended to bad mouth walking. Walking can be an excellent form of exercise that can have many benefits. This article intended to dispel the myth that walking and running are the same in terms of caloric burning ability. As this article illustrates, running is much more effective form of exercise for burning calories. Walkers just might have to walk a little more in order to hit their weight goal.

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You burn fewer calories when you exercise in cold weather than you do when it’s hot. The hotter it is, the more extra work your heart has to do to prevent you from overheating. More than 70 percent of the energy produced by your muscles during exercise is lost as heat. So the harder you exercise, the hotter your muscles become. In hot weather, not only must your heart pump extra blood to bring oxygen to your muscles, it must also pump hot blood from your heated muscles to your skin where heat can be dissipated.

On the other hand, in cold weather, your heart only has to pump blood to your muscles and very little extra blood to your skin to dissipate heat. Your muscles produce so much heat during exercise that your body does not need to produce more heat to keep you warm. So your heart works harder and you burn more calories in hot weather.

This information should not discourage you from exercising when it’s cold, because staying in shape is a year-round proposition. However, it may help to explain why so many people find the pounds creeping on in the wintertime, even when they stay active.

Dr. Gabe Mirkin has been a radio talk show host for 25 years and practicing physician for more than 40 years; he is board certified in four specialties, including sports medicine. Read or listen to hundreds of his fitness and health reports at http://www.DrMirkin.com

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Ah, exercise… It’s so healthy and good for you, yet we never seem to find the time to improve our lives through it. I know there are some days I really hate to do it, but I try to remember that it keeps me looking and feeling good!

Aside from a healthy diet, supplements and cellulite products, one of the single most important things to do is exercise. Exercise not only keeps us feeling healthy and young, but also improves overall circulation, detoxifies and helps to keep fats (a main contributor of cellulite) from settling on the body. However, there is no one cellulite exercise that will perform miracles on your butt and thighs if it is not part of the bigger picture.

Several cellulite exercises can be performed in your daily routine to contribute to the overall appearance of cellulite. Ideally, you want to incorporate two forms of cellulite exercise… aerobic/cardiovascular (running, power walking, swimming) and anaerobic (weight training).

Both of these serve a greater function in eliminating the problem areas in women, normally hips, butt and thighs. The cardiovascular portion of a workout improves the circulation of blood which allows the body to detoxify. It also reduces body fat, by burning it off. When you weight train, you build muscle tissue which also burns fat in a targeted area. So even if you aren’t fat so to speak, you can still focus on the areas that need improvement.

To begin, there are several alternatives you may wish to explore to start your cellulite exercise program. This may include anything from consulting with a trainer to show you the proper way to perform the training or perhaps just working on your own. Aerobic and anaerobic exercise can be performed separately or in conjunction with one another as part of the same workout.

What this means is you can, for example, power walk, run or swim one day and weight or spot train the next. Or… if you choose to perform the aerobic and anaerobic exercise at the same time it may include a short warm up to get the heart rate going, then performing 3-5 types of exercises in repetitions of 15 to 25 with very little in terms of a break in between. Maybe just enough time to chug some H2O! By repeating this routine of 3-5 cellulite exercises over and over, you not only focus on firming and toning muscles, but also keep that metabolism up which is very important to rid the body of fat and detoxify.

What constitutes a cellulite exercise? Well, primarily you want to focus on your thigh, butt and hamstrings (the muscle that’s behind and below your butt to the knee). These seem to be the areas where much fat tends to accumulate on women. Some good exercises for this area include lunges, leg curls, stiff-legged dead lifts and certain machines at the gym, more commonly known as abductor (outer) and adducter (inner) thigh machines. You may also do inner and outer thigh exercises on the floor with bands, leg lifts, etc.

Any combination of these cellulite exercises will help tighten and firm up the areas. As you become more accustomed to doing them, adding weight to your exercises challenges the muscles and helps them become stronger and more toned.

So in conclusion, add a healthy dose of cellulite exercise to your cellulite reduction program and diet to see the results happen!

Learn more information about exercises to reduce cellulite at our free resource:
http://reducecellulite.blogspot.com

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