Aerobic Exercises
Aerobic Exercise that you can sustain for more than just a few minutes while your hearts, lungs, and muscles work overtime. Oxygen transport and consumption, the role of the heart and the muscles, the proven benefits of aerobic exercise, how much you need to do to reap the benefits, and more. Imagine that you are exercising, you are working up a sweat, you are breathing hard, your heart is thumping, blood is coursing through your vessels to deliver oxygen to the muscles to keep you moving, and you sustain the activity for more than just a few minutes.
Benefits of Aerobic Exercises
- The average healthy adult inhales and exhales about 7 to 8 liters of air per minute. Once you fill your lungs, the oxygen in the air (air contains approximately 20% oxygen) is filtered through small branches of tubes (called bronchioles) until it reaches the alveoli. The alveoli are microscopic sacs where oxygen diffuses (enters) into the blood. From there, it is a beeline direct to the heart.
- The heart has four chambers two auricles and two ventricles that fill with blood and pump blood and some very active coronary arteries. Because of all these actions, the heart needs a fresh supply of oxygen, and as you just learned, the lungs provide it. Once the heart uses what it needs, it pumps the blood, oxygen, and other nutrients out through the large ventricles and through the circulatory systems to all the organs, muscles, and tissue that need it.
- Our heart beats approximately 60-80 times per minute at rest, 100000 times a day, more than 30 million times per year, and about 2.5 billion times in a 70-year lifetime. Every beat of our heart sends a volume of blood (called Stroke Volume- more about that later), along with oxygen and many other life-sustaining nutrients, circulating through your body. The average healthy adult heart pumps about 5 liters of blood per minute.
- All that oxygen being pumped by the blood is important. You may be familiar with the term “oxygen consumption”. In science, it is labeled VO2, or the volume of oxygen consumed. It is the amount of oxygen the muscles extract or consume from the blood, and it is expressed as ml/kg/per minute (ml per kilogram of body weight). Muscles are like engines that runs on fuel (just like an automobile that runs on fuel); only our muscles use fat and carbohydrates instead of gasoline. Oxygen is a key player because, once inside the muscle, it is used to burn fat and carbohydrate for fuel to keep our engine running. The more efficient our muscles are at consuming oxygen, the more fuel we can burn, the more fit we are, and the longer we can exercise.
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