How to overcome barriers to exercise….

Today's Post: Thursday, 7-9-2009

Safely done regular exercise does more good to help cause and keep good health than almost any medicine except those that save your life or turn down unbearable pain.

Some kinds of exercises do more for you than others and some are safer. But overall, doing regular exercise has so many and such powerful benefits, it’s almost like it was made magically good by Harry Potter.

If you do regular exercise, you’ll live longer, you’ll age more slowly and get fewer disabilities, you’ll enjoy sex more and for many years longer, you’ll be able to handle more stress more easily, you’ll think better and stay mentally sharp for years longer. You’ll be much less fat – particularly in the tummy area. If you do manage to lose fat, it will very likely stay off if you continue to do regular exercise plus you’ll tend to lose all fat instead of losing some muscle. You’ll be less likely to get migraines, most cancers, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, strokes, heart attacks, and high blood pressure. For those reasons, at any given age, your medical bills will average less over time than people who don’t exercise – often you medical bills will be less than half as much as would have been the case without exercise.

And, you’ll look better too!

Despite most people having heard that exercise is good for your health, I’m convinced that very few yet know the incredible magnitude and number of these benefits.

Going without regular exercise is about as harmful as doing without food, water, air, or sleep.

The trouble is that unlike those other things, your body doesn’t give you immediate feedback that there’s a problem when you don’t exercise.

It’s quite literally true that if people really knew what NOT exercising did TO them and what regular exercise does FOR them, very few would still not exercise.

However, it can be really hard to fit in exercise if you have to drive most places you go and already sleep less than 7 or 8 hours most days from lack of time.

And, for some people there are other barriers to exercise.

So anytime I see a decently well done article on how to overcome those barriers, I realize how valuable it is.

So, here’s one now! It was in Early to Rise yesterday, Weds, 7-8-2009.

(I’ll add my comments and some other ideas after it.)


"This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com."

"The REAL Reason You Avoid Exercise - and How to Defeat It

By Craig Ballantyne

The two main reasons people give for avoiding exercise are lack of time and lack of motivation. But those are really just politically correct answers. The truth is, most people just don't like to do it.

If you "hate" exercise, here are three ways to stay motivated and stick to your plan:

1. Work out with a partner or in a group. Bootcamp exercise classes are becoming more popular every year - mostly because they are a million times more fun than jogging on a treadmill by yourself. If you get a good high-energy trainer, and a few friends to join you, you'll have a grand old time while you burn belly fat.

2. Play the right music. Whether your bootcamp trainer brings it or you create a kick-butt mix on your iPod, working out to peppy music will make the time fly by.

3. Turn your exercise program into a golf game. In other words, keep challenging yourself to do better. That's what golfers do. They get hooked on the game because they always want to beat their last score. And by giving yourself a "score" to beat every time you work out, the competitive streak deep within you will come to the surface and you'll work harder and more consistently.

It's all about making it fun. That's why workouts like my Bodyweight 500 have become so popular that more than 5,100 readers of Men's Health magazine used it to burn up to 41 pounds of belly fat in just 8 weeks.

You, too, could see results like that.

[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training for Fat Loss program is the ultimate in fat burning. Not only are the exercises high-energy and high-intensity - which means they blast fat away - they are also quick and fun to do. Better yet, you can build a lean, toned body with just three 45-minute workouts a week.....]"

Craig's website is at: http://www.turbulencetraining.com/?hop=early2rise .

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A. My comments on this article.:

1. I can vouch for the first solution personally. When I was younger and knew a lot less, I could never make any progress with strength training because I had no role models that I actually could meet who knew more. And, I kept getting frustrated and would stop doing strength training from time to time.

Then a friend of mine asked me to join him and his gym buddies two nights a week.

I found it was so much fun to go and work out with my friend and work out buddies, I went every week for so long I began making a lot of progress. Their example and encouragement & their much greater experience and knowledge of strength training helped a lot too.

Since then I’ve seen many women who to group fitness classes or group sessions with a knowledgeable trainer have very much the same experience.

If you have to miss, the people you work out with notice and often are glad to see you when you make it back.

It really does help!

The other way to exercise with other people that many like is to play some kind of sport regularly. If you do it less than several times a week each and every week, it helps to do some kind of strength training or interval cardio too to be sure to get decent exercise every week. But doing a competitive sport often will work you out harder than working out on your own and you get great results studies show. If you like some kind of sport, have time to play it, and can avoid injury, it can be a really fun way to work out!

2. Music is a mixed review.

If it’s someone else’s idea of good music or it’s turned up so loud it’s uncomfortable, it can be a bit of a problem. (If it’s way too loud you can often get it turned down. And if you focus on doing your exercises and doing them well, you can ignore it otherwise.)

BUT, if it’s music you like or choose yourself or both & that has an inspirational feel or a compelling rhythm and a lot of energy, it can be HUGELY helpful.

That’s particularly true for dancing and for many kinds of cardio exercise.

Doing one of the more energetic dances from square dancing to much more energetic kinds is great exercise. If you enjoy dancing, that works great. NFL hall of fame great, Jerry Rice, continued to work out and keep in shape several hours a week even after he retired. Then he got into a dancing competition, Dancing with the Stars, on TV & promptly lost something like 20 to 25 pounds!!

Aerobics classes have used that kind of music for years. And, many of the people who have gotten the best results from using the Urban Rebounder, mini-trampoline, jumping rope, or Tae Bo have listened to music they liked with a lot of energy and rhythm every time they did an exercise session.

3. This one is also great for people who play games or sports and who play anything from video games to rugby. It’s fun to set new personal records or make progress.

It also helps people keep exercising to write down how well they do each time studies found. This can be quite time efficient by using a form you just plug a number or two in for each exercise as you do them.

That often comes naturally to people like engineers accountants, technical people, and scientists who develop related skills.

This approach to challenge yourself to moderate but achievable goals and progress also comes naturally to people with high motivation to achieve such as athletes, sales people, entrepreneurs and executives.

B. Fitting in exercise when you are often short of time also helps.

1. It helps to know that some exercise done regularly is so much better for you than none, that even if you can’t fit in much exercise timewise, it’s really worth doing.

a) That can be surprisingly little! If you do a couple or three really vigorous exercises for less than a minute each on as few as 3 days a week, a study found it dramatically improves your body’s ability to process sugar and will lower your level of blood sugar if yours is too high.

Director Clint Eastwood is well known for bringing in films on time or early and used this method. When he had a couple of minutes free or needed a break about that long, he’d knock out a fast set of pushups or situps a few times a week.

b) It’s also worth knowing that 500 calories a week of exercise gives you a full
40 % of the benefits of the ideal level of 3500 calories week even if the exercise is walking or light gardening.

The 45 minutes of exercise, just 3 times a week that Craig Ballantyne recommends burns at least 300 calories each time and 900 a week. And that’s just while you do the exercises. Since he uses vigorous exercise such as strength training or interval cardio, you burn extra calories for many hours after each session.

2. It also helps if you can exercise first thing in the morning before the sudden surprises or urgent problems of the day can override your workouts.

3. And, I’ve found one of the most time efficient ways to do that is to do fast exercise sessions of about 15 minutes each day at home each morning.

That requires no extra time to go to a gym either.

If you can get to the gym too that’s great! But by getting your most reliable exercise at home each morning, if you have to miss going to the gym later in the day, you’ll get in enough exercise to keep you healthy and you’ll mostly be able to pick up where you left off when you make it back to the gym I found.