What Exercise Is Your Go-To?

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Columbia engineered for whatever what exercise is your go to? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Tricia Nelson from Instagram asks, what exercise is your go to?

Ooh, kind of depends on the season.

But I'll be right back to answer that question.

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All right, so which exercise is my go to exercise? Well, if you've been around with me at all, you know I'm a big fan of fan of high intensity interval training. I call it bursting to blast fat. And I love high intensity Interval training for a couple of reasons. The number one reason, because you get it done quickly. And I don't know about you, but I'm always looking for how to find more time in the day. So if I can get exercise done quickly, sign me up. So that's the first reason I like high intensity interval training. Second reason is it elevates growth hormone. It creates a lot of oxidative stress. I'm gonna explain what it is actually, and then I'll tell you all these things that it does because you'll understand why. Well, I'll tell you all the good stuff first. So it trains your sympathetic nervous system how to handle stress better. It helps boost growth hormone. It gives you a good aerobic effect without lowering your immune system, which long distance cardio can lower. Your immune system. Long distance cardio also raises stress hormones and, and can be catabolic, burn up muscle, which is not a good thing. And of course, a lot of cardio gives you a lot of oxidative stress. It can be very aging. So those are the things. Now I love high intensity interval training because I can also create this big oxygen debt and then my body has to work harder after working out to recover from it. So it's going to boost my metabolism and I'm all about how can I get my body to need to have more calories throughout the day. So here we go. This is what it looks like. So high intensity interval training. And the other cool thing is you can pretty much do this anywhere. When I was in the hospital for four and a half months with my son, I did high intensity interval training, literally by running up and down the stairs at the hospital. Because a lot of days I couldn't get out of there. So I would run up them. And you can do this all out, any kind of big full body movement. This could be burpees, it could be Turkish get ups, it could be running up the stairs. It can be just getting in and out of, up and down, out of a chair. It really depends on your fitness level. It could be cycling. I recently got a peloton, so I've been doing hiit training on the peloton. Could be using, could be dancing, but just doing a lot of jumping. So whatever it is that you can do, moving as many muscles as possible that get you out of breath in 10 to 60 seconds. Now the latest studies are showing that shorter is better. So going all out for shorter. And I don't know about you, but I'd rather go all out for 10 to 20 seconds when I feel like I have to go a minute, I'm pacing myself. And it is amazing how relative time is, right? I mean, that's the big takeaway here. So let's think now of 10 seconds to 60 seconds, but let's tie it up. Go more for the 10 to 30 seconds, recover for twice as long and you actively recover. So if you ran up the stairs for 10 seconds, walk back down the stairs for 20 seconds, run up them, come down them, up em, down em. But you see how easy this is because you can literally do this anywhere. So if there's big hills, walk up the hill, come back down it, you can go and sprint and then walk it off.

Again.

Cycling, I use stairs, I use sprinting. I'll do it even on a paddle board, paddling, super duper hard and then recovering. So whatever suits your fancy. One of the things that's really important. So for my go to exercise, it's definitely hiit training because I like the endorphin response I get from it as well, but I mix it up all the time. I have a peloton at home. I got. I just got super excited about that. And a Stairmaster. And then I also have an exerciser and a step bench. So I have a lot of different things that I can mess around with and play around with as well as just doing some plyometric jump training. So the thing is, you want to mix this up as much as possible. So even though you're doing high intensity interval training, you're not doing the same stuff all the time. You're mixing it up because your body gets used to something. If you want to keep progressing, keep getting better, you got to keep shifting it up. And one important thing with high intensity interval training is it never gets easy, easier. You get stronger, so you can do more in less time. And that's what you need to do. Go harder. When you get stronger, you go harder. It should never feel any easier. All right, there's my go to exercise. I'd love to hear from you what your go to exercise is. Let me know in Instagram or Facebook. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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