There are four things that are so important for your health, mindset, exercise, diet, and sleep. There are only three things that comprise the entirety of the algorithm of life.

I’m going to leave you with that and see if you can guess what those might be, but we’re going to move on to our exercise. A few years ago, one of my health coaches asked me a very simple question, and it was a shock at what my answer was. He asked me when I exercise, do I sweat? I had to think for a minute, and absolutely I was not exercising to the point of sweating. I walk a lot. It’s quite common for me to walk three to five miles a day. It’s pretty much been a habit for the last 10 years. I walk a lot. I enjoy nature. I enjoy being outside, weather permitting.

The weather is permitting most of the time! It’s not the weather that stops us from going outside to exercise, it’s really the gear that we have. How well we dress, what kind of boots, or shoes, we have. In the East Coast here, the Northeast, we have pretty severe winter sometimes. Sometimes they’re moderate. Sometimes they’re severe, but having the right gear will help you to be able to enjoy that fresh air outside early in the morning. I want to point out that getting outside as early as possible is important because of something called the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is a biological hormonal endocrine process in our bodies where the sunlight coming from the window starts waking us up at 5:30, 6 in the morning.

That light takes the melatonin that’s in our bloodstream that’s being produced in our brain, and it starts slowly converting it to serotonin, which gets us up and gets us moving, and gets us moving forward. So in the evening when you need to calm down, and chill down, and start creating melatonin, it gets dark outside. That darkness allows us to create melatonin, which is why it’s important not to use light-emitting devices for the last one or two hours before we go to bed. Those light rays, especially those blue light rays, getting into our eyes, impedes and suspends that melatonin creation process, and we keep thinking, our bodies subconsciously keep thinking, it’s day time. We got to shut down. We got to learn how to turn off the computers. Stop looking at the phone, turn off the TV, all that stuff. There are apps now for the phone that can turn the screen with a reddish tint and block out the blue light. That’s a nice little tip. And those apps are free.

You can look for it in your App Store, or in the Google Play Store. Back to exercise. The question was, do you exercise, first of all, number one, do you exercise?

The second question is, do you sweat when you exercise? And I had to answer, honestly, I did not sweat. I was missing something in my life. The whole idea of exercise is to move your body, and for the cardiovascular system, we have this heart that generates the blood flow, this is a pump and it generates blood flow through 70 to a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels throughout the entire body. If you think it’s just veins and arteries, you’ve only covered about 14% of your body. To get 100% of understanding what the blood flow is, you got to take into consideration between the arteries and the veins there’s this huge amount of capillary beds, very, very, very tiny little thread-like, or sometimes less thickness than a strand of hair. Those blood vessels are everywhere throughout the body. From the very top of your head, your skin, your forehead, it’s red inside, right?

If you cut your toe, you start bleeding immediately. The blood is throughout the entire body. 100% of your body, every cell in your body, has to be connected within a certain range to blood flow because blood brings oxygen to the cells. Blood also carries away the metabolic waste from the cells.

The carbon dioxide and other metabolic waste are transported through the blood back to the lungs, through the lymph system for our excretion and our detox, even the sweat glands are part of the lymph system. And then all the other excretion that we do to get rid of things out of the body that we don’t need that have been used, or are unnecessary indigestible fiber, various items that pass through from our mouths through our gut, and then get excreted.

This movement is necessary in order to enhance our lives and to help to be healthy. You got to have good blood flow, and exercise is absolutely key.

And when we talk about exercise, we want to talk about sweating. It takes probably seven to 10 minutes to work up a sweat if you’re doing somewhat vigorous exercise. If you’re moderately exercising and you’re taking a walk, strolling with your dog, you’re getting exercise, great. That’s wonderful. It’s beneficial. But if you want to improve your cardiovascular system, you’ve got to get the heart rate up.

I’m going to give you a quick little math lesson on how to determine your maximum heart rate, and what is your proficient range of exercise.

Determining your heart rate. We’re going to determine a vigorous, yet safe range for you to exercise.

Maximum heart rate is determined for any particular activity by finding your maximum heart rate, and here’s how you do it. You subtract your age from 220. For example, if you’re 40 years old, subtract 40 from 220, and you get a maximum heart rate of 180. This is the maximum number of beats your heart is capable of permitted, safely, and done without too much strain. You can easily and safely exercise at around 80% of your maximum heart rate as a general rule. Examples. A 60-year-old, you minus 60 from 220, you get 160, and your times up by 80%, that would be 128 beats per minute. It’s not a big strain to do that. 70 years old, 220 minus 70, it’s 150 beats per minute. 80% of that is 120. If you’re not exercising at all, and you want to begin, then you should check with your doctor and verify what’s appropriate for you. We always recommend starting slowly and building up strength and endurance over time.

You can learn how to take your pulse either at the wrist or at the carotid artery. But even easier is to buy a smartwatch.

You can get them for less than $150, which monitors your heart rate. This series continues in the next video, how to do your exercise in four minutes a day.