How to get the power of exercise into your life....
Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-28-2010
Regular vigorous exercise has so many profound health benefits it rivals ten wonder drugs none of which has many side effects.
Such exercise prevents or even can help reverse mental decline, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and more. It slows aging by quite a bit. Both men and women who exercise have better sex lives. And, such regular exercise also relieves stress and often helps turn off or prevent depression. It also is a key to losing excess fat without too much hunger and then keeping it off permanently.
But, how to get into it if you haven’t been exercising?
It helps to start easy and then gradually make progress for months and months until you arrive at being strong and fit.
Dr Al Sears and others have also found it saves time and is safer to exercise in bursts of effort with easier exercise or rests in between instead of overdoing an unrelenting and long hard effort. This also gets you fit faster than other methods. This fits well with strength training and interval cardio.
Yesterday, livescience.com had this story, “Best Fitness Routines Fit Your Personality, Studies Show”
1. One trait that helps people take up regular exercise and succeed with it is called, “conscientiousness” in the article.
Some people are already reliable and work well on a regular basis with following a schedule. This skill helps people to succeed with regular exercise to such an extent, it’s worth learning if only for your exercise routine.
“Conscientiousness is strongly related to taking up physical activity in general," said Martin Hagger, a research psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.”
Regardless of what kind of exercise fits you best, scheduling when you’ll do each kind and writing down what you do each time you do it, has been shown to help people succeed in getting into exercise and keeping it up.
You can use a paper form you make up or better yet a logbook that lists the date and what you did. You get control and feedback from your record. I find it helps to use a kind of short hand and to do the exercises in the same order. Then in between exercises, I get a few seconds of recovery time before the next exercise when I jot down that I did that exercise. You can also keep a log on your computer. I personally like the logbook as I don’t need to spend time getting the computer on. So, I can just open the logbook and begin my exercises.
2. Doing some exercises first thing each morning, particularly if you can do them at home makes it much easier to fit exercise into your life before the demands of the day side track you. In fact, doing this doubles your chance of success just like keeping a schedule for your exercises and some kind of written log does.
3. Everything else can be customized to you.
It’s worth doing some kind of strength training and interval cardio each week, ideally in the morning, as a kind of foundation.
a) Then you can add almost anything you like to that. Yoga, taking walks, tai chi, dancing, playing basketball at the gym, etc.
b) But if you are just getting into exercise and have never really done it before, it can help to have some kind of intro you can use.:
You can hire a personal trainer you meet at a gym or who comes to your house.
You can go to a group class at a Gym. Some workplaces even have a lunch time program you can go to.
You can join a specialty gym like Curves for women where they teach circuit training and provide the equipment.
You can take an evening class in strength training at your local community college.
Some gyms will show you how to do the exercises and give you a starter routine when you join.
You can take an aerobic dancing class. You can join a square dancing group.
You can even now buy fitness apps for your iPhone.
Today's San Francisco Chronicle had a story in their technology section they titled, "Smart-phone fitness apps for a healthy new year."
For example, Nike recently released Nike Training Club which now offers more than 60 workouts & 90 drills for a variety of fitness levels.
A beginner's workout may include a light jog and some modified push-ups; advanced level workouts include jump rope, push-ups and more & there are videos of women performing the exercises correctly help you learn and do the keep correct form as you do the exercises.
There is also an app with step by step coaching by a Terminator sounding robot voice in the app Workout Trainer, by the online fitness-tracking company Skimble.
There are 882 health care and fitness titles in Apple's App Store at the moment. And, a large number of those are fitness and exercise apps.
Dr Al Sears teaches a time efficient method of interval cardio and has a video showing one version. But you can apply his system to almost any kind of exercise from walking to jump rope, which I currently do. See www.alsearsmd.com .
I initially went to the gym at my local YMCA in high school where I learned and did some strength training exercises. But I kept trying too hard to improve too fast instead of simply going every week and gradually making progress as I was easily able to do. Then, in College, a good friend of mine who had joined a local powerlifting group at the YMCA there invited me along. That kept me going because I went to hang out with my friends and the people I met in that group even on days I didn’t otherwise feel like going. Of course when I kept going for months and months, I eventually got much stronger and was able to lift decent weights in some of the exercises.
I kept records then to keep track of my best sessions. Now, I can exercise at home or in a gym and from my own list of exercises and on my own. But that first time, the social group keeping me going until I learned that was the key to making progress got me started.
What can you do? Try a couple of things. At first, you can even try just one thing. Keep doing the ones that work for you and try other things if the first ones don’t work.
What ever you try, keep records as you do the exercises. Try to do some parts of your exercises first thing in the day. Do some things on your own. Try some kind of group with other people you see regularly to see if that helps you.
Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-28-2010
Regular vigorous exercise has so many profound health benefits it rivals ten wonder drugs none of which has many side effects.
Such exercise prevents or even can help reverse mental decline, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and more. It slows aging by quite a bit. Both men and women who exercise have better sex lives. And, such regular exercise also relieves stress and often helps turn off or prevent depression. It also is a key to losing excess fat without too much hunger and then keeping it off permanently.
But, how to get into it if you haven’t been exercising?
It helps to start easy and then gradually make progress for months and months until you arrive at being strong and fit.
Dr Al Sears and others have also found it saves time and is safer to exercise in bursts of effort with easier exercise or rests in between instead of overdoing an unrelenting and long hard effort. This also gets you fit faster than other methods. This fits well with strength training and interval cardio.
Yesterday, livescience.com had this story, “Best Fitness Routines Fit Your Personality, Studies Show”
1. One trait that helps people take up regular exercise and succeed with it is called, “conscientiousness” in the article.
Some people are already reliable and work well on a regular basis with following a schedule. This skill helps people to succeed with regular exercise to such an extent, it’s worth learning if only for your exercise routine.
“Conscientiousness is strongly related to taking up physical activity in general," said Martin Hagger, a research psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.”
Regardless of what kind of exercise fits you best, scheduling when you’ll do each kind and writing down what you do each time you do it, has been shown to help people succeed in getting into exercise and keeping it up.
You can use a paper form you make up or better yet a logbook that lists the date and what you did. You get control and feedback from your record. I find it helps to use a kind of short hand and to do the exercises in the same order. Then in between exercises, I get a few seconds of recovery time before the next exercise when I jot down that I did that exercise. You can also keep a log on your computer. I personally like the logbook as I don’t need to spend time getting the computer on. So, I can just open the logbook and begin my exercises.
2. Doing some exercises first thing each morning, particularly if you can do them at home makes it much easier to fit exercise into your life before the demands of the day side track you. In fact, doing this doubles your chance of success just like keeping a schedule for your exercises and some kind of written log does.
3. Everything else can be customized to you.
It’s worth doing some kind of strength training and interval cardio each week, ideally in the morning, as a kind of foundation.
a) Then you can add almost anything you like to that. Yoga, taking walks, tai chi, dancing, playing basketball at the gym, etc.
b) But if you are just getting into exercise and have never really done it before, it can help to have some kind of intro you can use.:
You can hire a personal trainer you meet at a gym or who comes to your house.
You can go to a group class at a Gym. Some workplaces even have a lunch time program you can go to.
You can join a specialty gym like Curves for women where they teach circuit training and provide the equipment.
You can take an evening class in strength training at your local community college.
Some gyms will show you how to do the exercises and give you a starter routine when you join.
You can take an aerobic dancing class. You can join a square dancing group.
You can even now buy fitness apps for your iPhone.
Today's San Francisco Chronicle had a story in their technology section they titled, "Smart-phone fitness apps for a healthy new year."
For example, Nike recently released Nike Training Club which now offers more than 60 workouts & 90 drills for a variety of fitness levels.
A beginner's workout may include a light jog and some modified push-ups; advanced level workouts include jump rope, push-ups and more & there are videos of women performing the exercises correctly help you learn and do the keep correct form as you do the exercises.
There is also an app with step by step coaching by a Terminator sounding robot voice in the app Workout Trainer, by the online fitness-tracking company Skimble.
There are 882 health care and fitness titles in Apple's App Store at the moment. And, a large number of those are fitness and exercise apps.
Dr Al Sears teaches a time efficient method of interval cardio and has a video showing one version. But you can apply his system to almost any kind of exercise from walking to jump rope, which I currently do. See www.alsearsmd.com .
I initially went to the gym at my local YMCA in high school where I learned and did some strength training exercises. But I kept trying too hard to improve too fast instead of simply going every week and gradually making progress as I was easily able to do. Then, in College, a good friend of mine who had joined a local powerlifting group at the YMCA there invited me along. That kept me going because I went to hang out with my friends and the people I met in that group even on days I didn’t otherwise feel like going. Of course when I kept going for months and months, I eventually got much stronger and was able to lift decent weights in some of the exercises.
I kept records then to keep track of my best sessions. Now, I can exercise at home or in a gym and from my own list of exercises and on my own. But that first time, the social group keeping me going until I learned that was the key to making progress got me started.
What can you do? Try a couple of things. At first, you can even try just one thing. Keep doing the ones that work for you and try other things if the first ones don’t work.
What ever you try, keep records as you do the exercises. Try to do some parts of your exercises first thing in the day. Do some things on your own. Try some kind of group with other people you see regularly to see if that helps you.
Labels: how to begin exercising, ideas for finding exercises that fit you well, many ways and styles to get into exercise
posted by David at 1:42 PM
1 Comments:
Since I did this post, I had reasons to check out the specialty gym for women, CURVES.
If you are a woman who lives in an urban or suburban location who knows you need some extra help getting into and staying in a doable exercise program and some morale support, check out Curves.
www.curves.com
It's worked out well for many women and may be just what you need!
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