Tips on why & how to exercise….

Today's post: Monday, 8-18-2008

If you exercise regularly, you will weigh less than you would have if you didn’t. At any given weight, more of you will be muscle & less of you will be fat.

If you need to lose fat weight & have efforts in place to do that, doing regular exercise each week that includes strength training, will help you lose more fat & to only lose fat weight. In addition, by continuing to exercise, you will be much more likely to keep off the fat you lose.

In addition, regular exercise helps keep your blood vessels flexible & responsive.

Exercise, particularly strength training & interval cardio where each session alternates vigorous effort with less challenging effort, helps to keep your blood sugar down to the levels it should be.

Regular exercise also relieves stress & increases your tolerance for stress.

And, regular exercise, particularly strength training & interval cardio where each session alternates vigorous effort with less challenging effort, helps to increase HDL levels which reduces the amount of plaque deposited in your blood vessels.

Walking & Tai Chi are ideal low intensity exercises & can often be fit into your day in as little as ten minute time periods.

Alternating strength training & interval cardio where each session alternates vigorous effort with less challenging effort, with two days of each or three days of each every week if, can also help.

The ideal is to do some of each of these 3 kinds of exercise each week.

But it’s critical to realize that even a little bit each week of walking has been shown to give you a full 40 % of the health benefits of an ideal program.

If you need to, start there & make a strong effort to continue each week.

Here are some tips to help you begin exercising that have helped many people.

The most important three are to:

a) Decide you want to be one of the people who GETS the benefits of regular exercise.

People who do regular exercise live longer and in far better health than people who do none. Regular exercise tends to prevent or does prevent high blood pressure, obesity, senility, senior moments, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, & even cancer. It’s also been shown to reliably improve the sex life of both men and women.

It makes such a large difference, it can truly be said, if the people who don’t exercise at all knew what this was doing TO them and what regular exercise would do FOR them, almost everyone would exercise.

b) Decide what kinds of exercise you CAN do now and begin to do them every week.

For years I did cardio but no strength training because I was unable to afford to go to a gym that had heavier weights. My wife got fed up with my do-nothing attitude. She made the point that if I figured out what I could do at home with exercises that used my bodyweight such as pushups and with the dumbbell set we had at home, I’d get 100 percent more benefits than taking about exercises I could not do then.

I’ve made it to the gym since; but the exercises she got me to start doing have given me enormous benefits. Even better, this kind of exercise takes up so little space, virtually everyone can do it.

Similarly, you may not be able to do walking near your work or at home or it may be unsafe some parts of the year due to cold or heat; but if not, almost anyone can do it.

Another good way is to get a personal trainer or go to a class to learn how to strength train or do Tai Chi or other kind of exercise or physical skill. That will get you started and, once you know how, you can continue on your own.

If you can make it to gyms, the social support can help keep you going and exercising.

But regardless of what it is start immediately doing some kind of exercise regularly that you can do.

Then keep doing it. You can always improve to doing more or better exercise. But this one step, even if small, will give you a full 40 % of the benefits of an ideal exercise program.

Decide what you CAN do; & begin to do it every week.

c) On your home computer or on a logbook that you buy at a stationery store, WRITE down what exercise you do each day.

If you get into this habit, it will help you exercise consistently and keep doing it. It also can be great if you make progress that you can see in this log.

Lastly, it helps you keep up your weekly total amount of exercise. You may be forced to skip a day or only have time for half a workout. But by seeing this in your logbook, you can do a bit more on other days that week or next week and make a stronger than usual effort to exercise on other days to be sure your weekly total doesn’t drop off too much.

(It can also help quite a bit if you can do at least part of your exercises first thing in the morning. Because the more unpredictable demands of the day often happen later in the day, people who exercise in the morning are twice as likely to keep on exercising compared with people who only exercise later in the day.)

There are 3 kinds of exercise you can do.

1. One kind is any activity at all that burns calories. That can include gardening, housework, sweeping, playing ping pong, and short walks. It all counts. And, any of these you do regularly or vigorously or for long periods of time can do a lot for you.

2. Aerobic or cardio exercise builds endurance more than strength. But we now know that somewhat shorter sessions that alternate easier and much more vigorous “intervals” or “interval cardio” has three wonderful benefits over longer and unvarying cardio.

It gets you into good shape much faster and into better shape;
it’s actually far safer if you build up the much more vigorous parts gradually and do the exercise sessions regularly and ease off enough in the easier parts;
& it does MORE to build strength, protect your health, and burn unwanted fat than longer and unvarying cardio. The ideal is to do at least 3 sessions a week so that you never go longer than 2 or 3 days with none. Monday, Weds, Fri works; but so does Thurs, Sat, Sunday. Three days in a row and four days off each week is too many days off for best results; but two or three days in a row can be Ok if you get other kinds of vigorous exercise the days you aren’t doing cardio.

3. Progressive strength training where you do 6 to 12 repetitions and then increase the weight slightly when you can do 12 easily makes you a good bit stronger than doing cardio only and does a great job of burning unwanted fat.

It burns extra calories when you do it; like interval cardio; it boosts your metabolism and the number of calories your body burns for HOURS after you stop; & the increased weight the slightly large muscles it develops burn more calories at rest than the fat you would otherwise feed with the food that you eat.

If you wait a minimum of time between set, just enough to catch your breath and set up for the next set AND you put strong effort into at least some sets, you also get some cardio exercise. And, because stronger muscles can move you with less effort, strength training also builds ENDURANCE not just strength studies found.

With strength training, it’s important to give your muscles a day off between sessions to rebuild. If you want and have time, you can still do it 6 days a week by doing upper body 3 alternate days and lower body exercises the other alternate 3 days.

And, if you work hard in your sessions and do them regularly, even two days a week such as Tues, Thurs, or Mon, Weds or Weds, Saturday will build strength quite well. You do a bit better and definitely burn more calories with three. But you get more than two thirds of the benefits just doing two sessions a week. The secret is doing the two sessions almost every week or every week and working hard at each session.

Lastly, it makes exercise safer if you take reasonable precautions if you exercise outdoors or in unusually hot weather; manage your heart risks well in addition to exercising and exercise regularly to avoid causing heart problems; and if you take extra care to avoid injuries in strength training.