What is the Best Type of Exercise?

Reader submission:
"What is the best type of exercise to get a low heart rate"

The idea being that cardio-respiratory fitness, basically how well your heart and lungs are working, goes along with a lower resting heart rate as we can see marathon runners and sprinters with resting heart rates in the 40's or 50's. It's also more recently been shown to have some beneficial long term effects on brain volume as people get older, which sounds like a good thing, unless you have a small head. Fun fact: For UFC fight clearance, they make us check people's heart rates before and after doing 100 jumps - it doesn't change much from what I've seen.

There's a lot of different opinions out there, so instead of doing a lot of reading, I walked into the middle of our cardiology office and just asked the question loudly and the answers I got boiled down to either long-distance running or high-intensity interval training. I'm assuming that you can also lump in any long distance activity with a higher heart rate along with running such as cycling, swimming, those weird road-elliptical machines but I'm not sure if you can count hiking and walking depending more on how rigorous they are.

Similarly, along with high intensity interval training (short bursts of high energy), I think you could lump sports that include high intensity bursts for 10-20 seconds at a time.

Your heart being like any other muscle, both of these forms of exercise work it out and help it get more efficient at recruiting muscle to do the work. I think it's worthwhile to consider the other option if you've only been looking at one of these before.

If you're looking for some fun tips on interval training from the fancy-pants at Harvard, here you go!

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

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