How to Get Sick: Focus on Aerobics

While regular exercise is important for your health, keep in mind that high-intensity aerobic exercise, especially when it seriously elevates your heart rate for long periods of time, is essentially unnatural for your body. Throughout history, human beings in virtually every culture engaged in the functional, moderate-paced exercise that was necessary on the farm, at sea, or while hunting wild game. Long-distance walking or slower-paced labor functions may have been punctuated by intense but relatively brief bursts of physical labor or high-speed movement.

Intense aerobic exercise, like jogging or running on hard surfaces, may lower the immune response and create more oxidation through stress than anaerobic exercise (strength training). Consider marathon runners, who often struggle with decreased resistance to viruses and bacterial infections during their peak training seasons. They also battle chronic ligament and joint problems and long-term degeneration of organs and tissues.

When it comes to choosing the best exercise for your health, stick to moderate-paced activity with the occasional short burst of higher-intensity movement. What worked for your ancestors can work for you.

By Jordan S. Rubin