Lesson 1: Aerobic vs Anaerobic Exercise

Aerobic vs Anaerobic Exercise: What’s the difference?

Why do we care about the differences of aerobic and anaerobic exercise?

I’m sure we have all heard of the multitude of reasons why we may want to exercise = to strengthen our bodies and improve our mood, to name a few. But, not everyone knows the different between aerobic and anaerobic exercise and how they can be done separately to reach specific fitness and health goals that one may have. In this short guide, I have condensed key advantages of each type of exercise and given examples of each type, so maybe you can have a go at training both! Enjoy :)

Aerobic exercise

As its name suggests, aerobic exercises requires your body to utilize oxygen to provide energy (in the form of ATP) for your body. Often times, your longer and less intense exercising sessions are a form of aerobic exercise: For example, long distance running/cycling or playing a sport like badminton or basketball, are all aerobic exercises. During these sessions, your body bumps blood which is carrying oxygen to all cells of your body for such cells to then release ATP (energy) for your body.

Well, what are the advantages to aerobic exercises, and why should I do them? In the past decades, a significant amount of research has been done to explore the physical benefits specific to aerobic exercise. Vitally, it comes down to aerobic exercises and its ability to improve cardiovascular (everything related to your heart) health and reduce risk of cardiovascular diseases. As I mentioned, oxygen must be transported through blood, which is bumped by your heart. Therefore, the more you practice aerobic exercises, the stronger your heart (which is a muscle) is, and the more blood it can bump across your body. Often times when someone hopes to train their respiratory and muscle endurance, they would do more aerobic exercises to train their heart to pump more blood.

Anaerobic exercise

Contrastingly, as we spoke about how aerobic exercise indicates of the use of oxygen for energy provision, an-aerobic exercise would mean the opposite: A lack of oxygen utilized to provide energy during exercise. Rather than utilizing oxygen to release energy, energy sources within cells themselves (in the form of glycogen stores) are broken down to provide energy for muscle contractions and movement. One can think of anaerobic and aerobic exercise as polar-opposite twins: instead of exercising at lower intensity for longer periods of time (as is the case with aerobic exercise), anaerobic exercise involves short bursts of intense physical activity. Some examples of anaerobic exercise may include powerlifting, sprinting 100m, or any exercises that require higher efforts for very short duration of time.

Sometimes when you are doing anaerobic exercises, you might feel a strong soreness in the muscles being used. Don’t be scared, that is not your muscles giving up on you or tearing. Rather, it is lactic acid being produced as your cells provide energy anaerobically. By doing more of these anaerobic exercises, you get to improve your anabolic threshold, which is essentially the point where your muscles begin to tire out. Also, if you’re looking to build greater power, which is a combination of strength and speed, doing more intense yet short periods of aerobic exercises stimulates muscle growth and as we said before, glycogen is stored in muscles. Therefore, more muscles equals greater glycogen storage for more effective anaerobic respiration in cells!