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Keeping Fit
By peace | December 4, 2006
The first and most crucial step to fitness is to make decision to get started. Obviously, it is going to mean extra effort! There is no lazy way to get fit. But that does not mean that you have to loaunch yourself into a rigoruos physical-training programme. The essential thing is to start gently and build up gradually over the weeks.
While deciding which activities to pursue and how much time to devote to them, you can take the first steps to fitness by making a few changes in your lifestyle. Here are some:
1. Use your legs
Walk more each day to work or to the shops. Use the stairs instead of the lift. Get off the bus a stop or two sooner. Take every opportunity to use your legs.
Sustained brisk walks of five or ten minutes are an excellent introduction to fitness. Each day, put a little more effort into your walking. Tackle more stairs and hills. Aim to spend at least five or ten minutes a day performing some activity that makes you moderately breathless — by putting a little more effort into the housework or do-it-yourself jobs, by playing tag or another active game with the children or by towelling briskly after a bath or shower.
Even standing still is better exercise for your heart and circulation than sitting or lying.
You get the most benefit from exercise if you do it for at least 30 minutes a day for 5-6 days a week. But you do not have to do 30 minutes in a row. Recent studies suggest that you get the same benefits if you work out for 10 minutes 3 times a day that you do during a longer session.
2. Stop Smoking
Cigarette smoking reduces stamina. A few minutes after someone smokes a cigarette, the air-tubes(bronchioles) in the lungs shrink, almost doubling the resistance to airflow. While that makes little difference at rest, it leads rapidly to breathlessness during exercise.
Smoking raises the heart-rate by about 20-30 beats a minute, which reduces stamina. Nicotine in the bloodstream is also associated with the silting up of arteries with fatty deposits, reducing the blood flow to active muscles including the heart, and increasing the risk of thromobosis.
The fewer cigarettes you smoke, the more good exercise will do you. Exercise cannot cancel out the effects of smoking.
3. Shed Excess Weight
Exercise helps you to lose weight, but equally, staying slim helps you to benefit more from your fitness programme. The more surplus fat you lose, the more comfortable you will be when exercising, and the less likely you will be to suffer injury. So combine your fitness programme with sensible eating.
4. Advanced Exercise Programmes
Once you have reached basic fitness, you may want to develop particular muscles to improve your performance in some specific activity. For example, tennis or judo. One of the most efficient ways of doing that is ‘weight training’ — exercises using weights, such as barbells or dumb-bells, or even plastic bottles filled with water or sand. The benefit comes from the repetition of exercising your muscles against the resistance of the weights. Different exercises develop different muscles so take advice from a trainer or a training manual.
Topics: All Posts, Man's health, Woman's Health |
