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.
Everyone should be seeking to find a way to monitor there daily exercise and adding to their daily routine. The most important step is the first step. If you have led a rather sedentary life for some time, your best approach to adding more exercise is to start at a comfortable level and add a little more activity as you gain in strength, flexibility, and endurance. Starting to exercise more will improve your health and well-being.
A good regular exercise program will help your health, longevity, self-confidence, attitude, sleep, productivity, energy, muscle and bone strength, and weight. Regular exercise will also reduce your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and a stroke.
Four Foundational Types of Exercises
There are four general kinds of exercise: endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility. When you exercise it is best if you can work in each kind of exercise.
Stamina
For those just beginning, your first goal would be to build up to a minimum of 30 minutes of activity that makes you breathe hard. The more days each week you can do this the better. You don’t have to go out and do a 30 minute aerobic exercise you can do it ten minutes at a time. A general rule of thumb to go by is if you can talk during the exercise without any trouble at all, the exercise is too easy, while if you can’t talk at all, it’s too hard.
Strength
Strength exercises build muscles. When you have strong muscles you can do more activities, have more freedom, and more choices. You become more productive.
Balance
Do workouts that work your balance. Try standing on one foot, then the other. If you can, don’t hold on to anything for support except to regain your balance. There are numerous exercises that require the use of a stability ball that will work your balance. Be sure to include these exercises in your routine.
Flexibility
Stretching can help you be more flexible. Stretch when your muscles are warmed up. Don’t stretch so far that it hurts. Stretching will also make you more productive and allow you to do more activities.
Create a workout with exercises from each category.
You can do it simply by taking that first action. Your age doesn’t matter. There are exercises that can be done safely and healthily for any age.
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.
Developing a workout routine not only builds self-discipline, but helps you physically, mentally, and emotionally. A good fitness program improves your stamina, strength, balance, and flexibility. It causes you to burn fat and gain muscle. You will reshape your body improving your self-image and self-confidence.
People have many, many options when creating a fitness program. Your over-all health and goals will help you create an exercise routine that fits into your life-style. More and more professionals use light weights or body-weight exercises when designing a program. It is easy to find excellent workout programs you can do at home. You just need to find some that will cover each exercise type. The next step is to get started, now! You can also get quite a bit of information by looking 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
The following information on fitness was adapted from an article by Anthony Diluglio. The full article can be found at http://www.artofstrength.com/info.php?id=224
Restoring fitness entails clarifying exactly what it means to be fit. Most fitness experts generally agree that the days of isolation movements are gone as part of a good workout. Working on machines or at free weights doing the standard bench press and leg curls simply doesn’t help us become more fit. With all due respect to Jack Lalanne, who invented some of these machines, the workouts he did on his television show 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.
The Loss of Physical Fitness
The loss of physical fitness was not intentional, rather it was accidental and most certainly unbeknownst for many years. The old “strongman” workouts involving weight lifting were developed in such a way that the entire body was enlisted to perform the task. Nothing was being isolated, nothing was being left out, the exercises required not only great physical strength, but a tremendous amount of cardiovascular strength. It is this cardio vascular strength that was the greatest loss in the transition from weight lifting to body building workouts.
In his book “The Development of Physical Power” 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.” Later, Britain’s strongman Edward Aston writing for The Superman Magazine in December 1930 wrote of a “muscle cultivator” named Percy Whittaker, who by his 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 his definite size advantage over Aston. “Whittaker had cultivated muscle at the expense of strength”, Aston said. He wrote, “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.
What goes around comes around
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.
Exercise Routines
To lose weight permanently and improve your over all health and fitness you need to develop a workout routine. You need to become more active to increase your metabolism and burn more calories. The workout routine does not have to be in the gym, using exercise machines, or running 3 miles a day. You simply need to find ways to get more movement – walking and carrying loads – into your daily activities. Time is probably the number 1 excuse people have for not working out.
The truth of the matter is everyone has the same amount of time and everyone has the same basic responsibilities. We all have our professional responsibilities, personal social responsibilities (friends, family, volunteering, church), personal management responsibilities (shopping, managing money, managing daily living), and we all need to sleep. The question then is how do each of us prioritize the time we have into those areas. Health and fitness can be worked into each of those areas. You can find ways during your work day to get more walking or carrying loads. You can find ways to combine time with friends and family into workout routines. Time is not your enemy – motivation is.
Motivation
Motivation is much too large of a topic to cover in this article on obesity and exercise. Suffice it to say there are many books, articles, lectures, etc. available that will help people learn about motivation. You must realize that what self-motivation boils down to is having enough of a vision about where you want to be and how you get there that you will be able to overcome all the obstacles that stand in your way. Other than time the major obstacles are pain and relationships. Unfortunately for many people their vision is simply not strong enough to overcome the perceived or actual pain and discomfort that exercise causes. Even more disturbing is that far too often rather than being supportive the social network of these people actually reinforces and discourages the very motivation needed to achieve the results they seek. Much of this topic will be discussed in our third article.
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