How much anaerobic exercise is enough

Complete 8 to 10 exercises. Proper technique is very important. Related Stories. Exercise for stress management. Secret benefits of weight loss. How air pollution affects your workout.

View all related stories. Share this story. Download the app today! Living Better. Your body creates energy in two basic ways: anaerobically without oxygen and aerobically with oxygen , and each of those methods will affect your body differently. Understanding that process can help you burn calories and fat—plus increase your overall strength, power, and endurance.

Without oxygen, the body uses adenosine triphosphate ATP and glucose in the muscle cells for energy. These workouts primarily utilize slow twitch muscle fibers and the glucose and fatty acids the anaerobic system has already produced for fuel, which can sustain activity for extended periods of time, adds Bell. Any lower- to moderate-intensity exercise is considered aerobic. Think about steady-state exercise like walking, running, cycling, or even dancing.

Obviously, these styles of training are pretty different. Aerobic exercise triggers fat burning, because you still have oxygen in your muscle tissue. Anaerobic exercise has been shown to burn more total calories in a shorter amount of time. On the other hand, anaerobic exercise—like HIIT—has been shown to burn more total calories in a shorter amount of time. To picture how these training methods affect your body, think about the bodies of elite athletes: A typical cross-country runner or marathoner follows a highly aerobic training program, whereas a CrossFitter is someone who prioritizes an anaerobic program.

To understand how each impacts your body and your fitness game, we've asked fitness trainers to give us the down-low on aerobic vs anaerobic exercise, plus how much you should be getting of each. As you could imagine, operating without oxygen can't last for that long of a time considering the fact that we need oxygen in order to, um , live. So, when our bodies are using muscular function to produce force, we have an energy system that allows us to produce more power and do that without relying on the external energy source of oxygen being present.

To put this into perspective, the shorter the burst of energy, the more likely you are to have anaerobic exercise, while the longer your form of fitness stretches, the more likely you are to switch into aerobic exercise.

For about 10 to 30 seconds, he says, you'd be able to maintain the highest level of intensity, but then your heart rate would shoot up and that energy would be depleted, and you'd need to re-oxygenate your cells.

To get a sense of the benefits of aerobic and anaerobic exercise, respectively, it helps to think about them this way: Aerobic is more about endurance, and anaerobic is more about power. Here's how to further differentiate them. Aerobic exercise: "When you're doing aerobic exercise, it's about endurance and creating a workout that you can maintain a certain level of quality throughout," says Lauder-Dykes. This means that distance running, cycling, walking, and rowing fall under aerobic fitness, since you're moving at a moderate level for a longer period of time.