Exercise Science

Understand that following your exercise plan is key to making sure you are exercising safely and are improving the health of your heart. Learn how to monitor your heart rate to ensure you are exercising within your target range.

This instructor-led physical fitness video offers a daily regimen of strengthening, range-of-motion, balance, and breathing exercises for people with Parkinson’s disease. Gentle seated calisthenics and stretches include neck rotations and head sweeps, shoulder rolls, trunk stretches, rowing and swimming motions, arm and wrist circles, finger stretches, marching, hip rotations, hamstring stretches, ankle flexes and rotations, and lower back stretches. Gentle seated Thera-Band muscle-toning exercises include shoulder blade pinches, shoulder joint flexes, triceps curls, rowing motions, marching, thigh flexes, and ankle flexes. And gentle standing exercises include sit-to-stands, hip extensions, rear-kicks, squats, and calf stretches. The program ends with deep breathing. (48 minutes)

Increasing your child’s level of physical activity is important to your child’s weight loss success. Learn ways to encourage your child to exercise and to incorporate exercise into your entire family’s daily routine.

Weight lifting, sprinting, and doing pushups are anaerobic exercises, which require a lot of energy, depleting the body’s oxygen reserves. The oxygen debt requires rapid deep breathing to restore a proper oxygen level to muscle cells. Repeated exercise causes related muscle fibers to enlarge. If more oxygen is required than is available during your workout, your muscles obtain energy using a rapid, inefficient process called anaerobic metabolism. This process creates lactic acid, a waste product that causes muscle soreness. By contrast, if you run long distances and exercise regularly, your cardiovascular and respiratory systems adapt and are able to continue using a process called aerobic metabolism for much longer. While you run, your body can supply adequate oxygen to meet your energy requirements and you do not produce lactic acid, which spares you soreness

Understand the benefits resistance training offers your body, and learn ways to properly include it in your exercise plan.

Learn the three main types of exercise as well as ways to increase activity in your daily life and tips to keep you motivated to continue making exercise part of your normal routine.

Learn the importance of including a variety of exercises including cardiovascular, resistance, and strength training as well as exercises that strengthen your core to ensure your entire body gets the attention it needs.

Conceived with the help of a Nobel Prize–winning sperm donor, a baby girl blossoms into a gifted, highly intelligent woman. Does her talent come solely from heredity? What about the case of female twins, separated at birth, who exhibit astonishing similarities in habit and behavior when they meet later in life? This film explores the possibility that genetics and environment are not diametrically opposed when it comes to human development—instead, the program asserts, they should be seen as complementary. Other case studies involve fatal nutritional disorders that are passed from one generation to the next, as well as Tay-Sachs disease, the genetic disorder notorious for its impact on one particular ethnic group, the Ashkenazi Jewish community. A timely analysis of lingering, problematic assumptions—those that support genetic determinism and those that focus solely on parental or societal roles in shaping human life. (46 minutes)

We have long been told that getting regular exercise is key to a healthy life. But with recent advances in genetic testing technology and brain stimulation techniques, scientists are learning new and surprising truths about what exercise really does for the body and why we all respond to it differently. In this program, Michael Mosley explores research on the benefits of just three minutes of high-intensity exercise per week. Using himself as a human guinea pig, Mosley also discovers the power of simple activities like walking and fidgeting, and finds out why some people don't respond to exercise at all. A BBC Production. (59 minutes)