As you get started with your fitness program, two words that you may hear tossed around quite frequently are ‘anaerobic’ and ‘aerobic’. Understanding the difference between the two can help you gain a better understanding of how your workout is structured and what type of training you should be doing to target each element of your fitness level.
The terms aerobic and anaerobic are essentially used to describe two different energy systems in the body, aerobic operating in the presence of oxygen while the anaerobic operates without the presence of oxygen.
Let’s have a quick look at a few of the key defining characteristics of each exercise variation.
Aerobic Exercise
When you hear the term ‘aerobic’, you should think of exercise that is done at an intensity where you are comfortable able to get enough oxygen into the muscle cells and are using the foods you’ve eaten recently, namely carbohydrates and dietary fats, as a fuel source.
Aerobic exercise is any form of exercise that you can sustain for a longer period of time (greater than four minutes) and usually you are able to have a conversation with a personal nearby while doing it.
Anaerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercise on the other hand is exercise that’s performed at an incredibly intense pace, so intense in fact that the body is unable to keep up with oxygen demands of the working muscle cells and cannot efficiently break down food sources for fuel utilization purposes.
Because of this, the body needs to turn to an alternate source for fuel, that source being stored muscle glycogen (the storage form of carbohydrates in the muscle cells).
For this reason, those who are using very low carb diets will often really struggle to perform anaerobic exercise due to the fact that they have such little storage form of energy built up in their reserves.
Anaerobic exercise will be exercise that can only be carried out for a short period of time lasting anywhere from 10 seconds up to around two minutes.
Due to the fact that lactic acid will be developing in the muscle cells because of the lack of oxygen at this point, intense muscle fatigue will start to be felt and the exercise will come to a stop.
Examples Of The Two Exercise Variations
Some examples of aerobic exercise would be going for a longer distance jog or run, cycling, swimming, skating, as well as walking. All of these activities you can sustain for a longer period of time with ease and proper training.
Examples of anaerobic exercise on the other hand would be weight lifting, sprinting, and team sports that involve intermittent bouts of all out exercise such as soccer, hockey, volleyball, and football.
Practical Applications
When it comes to adding the two types of exercises into your workout routine, one important thing to note is that the common belief that aerobic exercise is best for fat burning is not correct.
While you are able to use fat as a fuel source during this lower intensity exercise, the minute by minute calorie burn during anaerobic exercise will be greater, and not only that but anaerobic exercise will also create the best post-exercise calorie burn due to a process called EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption).
Therefore, from a fat loss standpoint, anaerobic exercise tends to come out above.
To increase muscular endurance focus on aerobic forms of exercise while to focus on muscle strength as well as maximum oxygen consumption capacity, focus on anaerobic exercise instead.
The best programs will combine the two so that you get the best of both worlds.
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