Five Things

 

My personal training certification program was full of fancy little acronyms for things.  A lot of them did not stick in my brain, but one of them seems like a useful thing to share this week, since I’ve been banging on about what sort of workouts we should choose for ourselves.  It’s called the FITTE principle, and it is another way to think about the kinds of questions I want us to use when we evaluate what we’re doing.

 

FITTE stands for Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type, and Enjoyment.  We all know what those words mean in regular life, but let me zoom in a bit for the fitness context.

 

Frequency is about how often we work out.  While it would be nice to work out once and be done for life, that’s not how it actually works.  If we’re just getting started, we want to do three to five days of cardio a week.  Once five days is easy, we can add a strength training session or two.  And in my ideal world, we’d all make time to stretch every day.

 

Intensity is how hard we work.  We want to work hard enough to get sweaty and breathless and maybe even a little sore, but not so hard that we pass out, vomit, or refuse to get out of bed the next day.  If we are the kind of people who love charts and graphs and math problems, we can calculate our max heart rate in beats per minute (220-our age) and then aim for keeping our working heart rate between 65 and 85% of that.  If we are not those people, we want to work hard enough that it would be hard to sing, but we can still talk.

 

Time is how long we work.  It tends to be inversely proportional to intensity.  That is, if we’re going to work really really hard, we won’t do it for quite so long, like a sprint; if we’re going to work less hard, we can go longer, like a marathon.  We would like to make sure we get about 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise.

 

Type is what we do.  In the broader sense, this is cardio or strength training.  In the narrower sense, it’s boot camp or swimming or circuit training or quality time with the treadmill.

 

Enjoyment is the one that most of us kind of skip.  We suck it up and exercise because we’re supposed to and we don’t want to have a heart attack or buy bigger jeans.  But there are so many kinds of exercise out there that taking the time to figure out one that is actually fun is totally worth it.

 

Go play.