Working Out Hard Better Results According to One Study

There are two schools of thought on exercise. One school is that through moderate workouts you can maximize the health benefits of exercise. Another school indicates that, with reason and making smart use of rest and light days, the more intense your workouts, the better your results and the better overall level of both health and fitness.

If you are workout hard, really hard, the notion espoused by the first school is a little depressing. No one who is working hard wants to think they are getting significantly diminishing marginal returns when giving it that extra push. I can't say I am always killing myself every time I workout, but when I do get in a zone, which I'm in right now--I'm going at it pretty hard. You want to think you are getting bang for that grind-it-out buck. If you are in the latter camp, you will be pleased with a Ball State study that came out recently that found the cardiovascular and respiratory systems of highly-trained individuals decline at a slower rate compared with those of both moderately trained and, of course, people who do not workout at all. Specifically, the study found a pretty equal drop-off between the groups. People on intense training schedules lose aerobic capacity at a rate of about 0.5 percent every ten years. Moderately-trained runners experience a 1 percent decline over ten years, and untrained persons suffer a 1.5 percent decline over a 10 year period.

This is the just one study but the implications of this study are the harder you workout, within the confines of reason, the better off you will be.