If you struggle with your weight the second phase of a complete weight management program is to increase the amount of calories you burn. Exercising causes you to burn more calories. Far too many Americans simply do not get enough exercise in their every day activities, so they must find ways to add that exercise into their daily routines. Even if you are fortunate enough not to struggle with weight problems, exercising is a vital part of having good health.
You should be thinking about adding exercises to your daily routine. The most important step to take is the first step. If you have not had physical activities as part of your daily routine in some time, your best approach is to start at a comfortable level and add a little more activity as you gain in strength, flexibility, and endurance. Exercising will improve your life.
A good regular exercise program will help you be healthier, live longer, improve your self-confidence, have less chance of becoming depressed, improve your sleep, be more productive, be more active, have stronger muscles and bones, and help you stay at or get to a healthy weight. Regular exercise will also reduce your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, and a stroke.
Four Basic Categories of Exercise
There are four basic types of exercise: endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility. To get all of the benefits of physical activity you should do all four types of exercise.
Stamina
Try to build up to at least 30 minutes of activity that makes you breathe hard. You should try to get that activity on most or all the days of the week. You don’t have to be active for 30 minutes all at once. Ten minutes at a time is fine. If you can talk during the exercise without any trouble at all, you are not working hard enough. If you can’t talk at all, it’s too hard.
Strength
Strength exercises works your muscles making them work harder for longer periods of time. When you have strong muscles that enables you to do more activities, have more freedom and choices. Your productivity will improve.
Balance
Exercises that force you to balance your body are important to perform. One simple one would be balancing on one leg and then the other. You can begin making that more challenging by squatting while balancing on one leg or by doing it with you eyes shut. Only use support to regain your balance. There are numerous exercises that require the use of a stability ball that should be included in these balancing exercises.
Stretching
Stretching is done to improve the elasticity of your muscles. You should stretch when your muscles are warmed up not to warm your muscles up and you shouldn’t stretch so far that it hurts. Stretching will also improve your productivity and allow you to do more activities.
Take Action & Develop a Workout.
No matter your age begin by taking that first step. Find some exercises to do that can be done at anytime during the day and fit into one or more of the four categories. Then simply perform those exercises each day. Your routine has now begun.
Developing a good workout will allow you to improve your strength, flexibility, and athleticism. All of us can benefit from the lessons learned by kinesiologists – those who study human movement. Being fit is important because it allows you to participate in athletics well into your senior years, which is great for social interaction and releasing of stress. You could golf, swim, play baseball or softball, ski, or do a host of other athletic endeavors. Being fit also improves your ability to handle life’s daily grind. Whether it is the physical demands of your job, gardening, or doing household work, being fit makes those tasks much more enjoyable.
Workouts help you in many ways – physically, mentally, and emotionally. Good fitness programs improve your heart, strength, balance, and flexibility. You can lose fat and gain muscle. If you are overweight you will reshape your body, which will generally improve your self-image.
Your over-all health and goals will help you determine which program, of the many available to you, you will want to choose. More and more personal trainers are using light weights or their own body weight in designing workout routines. It is easy to find excellent workouts you can do at home and in a reasonable time frame. You just need to find some that will fit into each category. The next step is to get started, now! You can get quite a bit of information on the internet. I recommend you look at any of Jack LaLanne’s books, old television series, or other products. You will also want to visit with your doctor and let him or her know of your plans.
Restoring Fitness
Some of the following information on fitness comes from an excellent article by Anthony Diluglio. The full article can be found at http://www.artofstrength.com/info.php?id=224
Before we can restore fitness we need to clarify exactly what fitness means. Most personal trainers and other fitness experts seem to agree that isolation movement exercises are gone as part of a good workout. Working out on weight machines or using free weights doesn’t help us become more fit. Workouts using your own body weight, light resistance, or kettlebells are much more in-line with where we are headed.
If your goal is body building than walking into a gym, sitting on a bench and banging out 3 sets of chest presses followed by 3 sets of incline presses topped off with a few sets of flies would be an appropriate routine. If you walk out of the gym after that routine thinking you’ve just gotten a fitness workout you’re certainly in denial.
How We Lost Physical Fitness
Our societal loss of physical fitness was accidental and unrealized for many years. The old workouts done by “strongmen” involved weight lifting in such a way that the entire body was used. Nothing was being isolated or being left out, the exercises required great physical strength as well as a tremendous amount of cardiovascular strength. It is the cardiovascular strength that was the greatest loss in the change from weight lifting to body building workouts.
In “The Development of Physical Power” strength guru Arthur Saxon wrote:
“I shall teach you to judge a man by his capabilities as an athlete, whether a weightlifter, wrestler or not, and not by the measurement of his biceps or chest. … My idea will be, and always has been, to leave the muscles to look after themselves, but I place a premium upon the possession of untiring energy, great stamina (sic) and vital power, and a sound constitution.” Britain’s Strongest Man, Edward Aston while writing for The Superman Magazine in December 1930 wrote of a body builder named Percy Whittaker who by Aston’s account “looked big enough and powerful enough to beat any Professional Strong Man”, but was hard pressed to beat Aston at even some of the simplest weight-lifting tests despite the rather obvious size advantage Whittaker had over Aston. “Whittaker had cultivated muscle at the expense of strength”, he said. Aston also went on to say, “here I would point out that these ‘muscle cultivators’ are the men who have given Physical Culture such a bad name as it possesses and who have, to no small extent, retarded the progress of weight-lifting as a sport.”
Chris Barr a teenager from Providence, RI is a great story on what can be done when we develop exercise programs that build fitness. Chris was the captain of his football team and star of his track and field team the very first year he competed. One day Chris was asked by one of his coaches to attempt the dead lift. All Chris did was set his school record. At only 165 pounds Chris deadlifted more than twice his weight – 365 pounds – which was 100 pounds heavier than the previous school record. The real point of this story is that Chris never, never, practiced the deadlift. In fact, it was the first time he had ever even attempted it. Chris had built his extraordinary strength and stamina by working out only with kettlebells since the age of 13. He had more strength than someone twice his weight. This combination of strength, stamina, and speed, which was all developed with his workout routine, is what has made him the star of his track and field team and earned him the recognition to be captain of his football team.
Back to the beginning
What fitness “experts” are doing now is they are returning to the beginning. They are taking workouts done by famous strength building experts such as Charles Atlas, the Saxon Brothers, Edward Aston and Eugene Sandow and are using them in their personal and group classes. Attending these classes is like returning to a bygone era. When you witness a 50-year old woman perform a “one-hand anyhow lift” or a “bent press” with 100 pounds you know they are doing something right. It should have always been about quality not quantity of muscle. It is about time these experts are returning to the roots and fixing the mistakes that were made. They had it right in the beginning and we have come to realize that by trying to make things easier we managed to make it worse.
To become fit requires effort. It takes sweat, determination, and of course time. Anything worth doing takes all of those things, fitness is no different. We are no longer concerned with building big muscles. All of us should be concerned with building strength and stamina. We should be as fit as we look.
Workout Routines
To achieve and maintain a healthy weight as well as becoming fit you need to develop a fitness routine. Physical activity is required to increase your metabolism and burn more calories. Your fitness routine does not require a gym membership, the use of expensive exercise machines, or running 3 miles a day. You do need to discover ways to work more physical activity into your regular daily activities. The physical activity should involve more walking and the carrying of weight and at the same time should include flexibility and balance training. It seems likely that the number one excuse given for not exercising regularly is time.
The truth is time is not the problem, your personal motivation is the problem. God gave everyone 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. We all also have work, social responsibilities (friends, family, volunteering, church), personal management (shopping, managing money, managing daily living), and sleep that need to be scheduled into our days and week. If we all have the same amount of time and same basic responsibilities the question becomes how can we prioritize those so health and fitness doesn’t take a back seat. How can fitness be worked into each of the areas of responsibility to best make use of our time? You can find time during your work day to get more walking and carrying of loads into your routine. You can find ways to combine time with friends and family into an exercise routine. Your ability to think outside the box and your motivation is the key.
Motivation
Motivation is such a large and important topic to cover that it requires an entirely separate article. There are numerous books, articles, lectures, and the like that are available to anyone struggling with self-motivation. Essentially, self-motivation is all about having a powerful enough of a vision about how you want your future to be and how to get there that you persist until you overcome all the obstacles that stand in your way. Time is really not the major obstacle, pain and relationships are. Unfortunately many people cannot create a powerful enough vision to motivate themselves to overcome the perceived and actual pain or discomfort that exercise causes. Even more discouraging is that far too often the social network of people struggling with obesity or weight control discourages the very motivation needed to achieve the results they seek. This topic will be the focus of the third article in the series.
To learn more visit visit physical-education-institute.
Bodybuilding Review
Mail this post