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by Metro Transportation Library and Archive

Article by Jko

Exercise and Your Body

Even the most committed couch potato has sprinted to catch a bus

or an elevator, and all of us can remember how it feels to exercise.

Physical exertion makes your heart beat faster and harder. Your

breathing also gets faster and deeper. If you’re at it long enough,

your skin will get flushed, warm, and damp with perspiration.

Your muscles will be taut from effort, and they may ache and

stiffen up for some time afterward. If you are really pushing yourself,

you may notice some nausea, abdominal discomfort, or lightheadedness,

and you might enjoy high spirits right after you come

to a stop, only to feel tired, sleepy, or a bit grumpy later in the day.

You don’t have to be an exercise physiologist to know that

exercise makes your heart, lungs, and muscles work harder or that

your metabolism speeds up, producing extra heat. But even

though an occasional burst of exercise may enable you to catch a

bus or enjoy a sporting afternoon with the kids, it won’t do much

for your health.

For fitness and health, sporadic exercise won’t do–but regular

exercise will do very nicely indeed. The body responds to

the stress of habitual exercise with a remarkable series of adaptations

that are collectively known as the training effect. Hippocrates

didn’t have the benefit of modern exercise physiology, but the

Father of Medicine seems to have predicted the training effect

some twenty-four hundred years ago when he wrote “that which

is used, develops; that which is not used, wastes away.”

Regular exercise will produce long-term changes in many of

your body’s organs and functions. But at the heart of your

improvement is your heart itself.

Exercise and Your Heart

Just for a moment, suppose youve become a member of a highpowered

health club. You set up an appointment with a fitness

specialist and ask him or her to design a training program that will

enable you to lift a seventy-pound weight the distance of one

foot. No problem, says the trainer