Month of Gratitude: Cardio

November is a month of gratitude.  There is plenty of research out there that suggests that practicing gratitude is good for our health.  For Reasons (OK, because gratitude practice tends to backfire when my personal Depression Monster is in residence:  how can I be dealing with the DM when I have so much to be grateful for?  And we spiral from there…), I am not a Gratitude Journal kind of person, but that does not mean that it doesn’t work in the general sense; it just doesn’t work for me.  That said, I am going to practice some gratitude here this whole month.

So:  what am I grateful for today?  Cardio exercise.  When I am crabby and cranky, odds are good that some quality time on my spin bike will do the trick to fix my mood.  A walk outside has a similar effect, plus no one will hear me grumbling.

 

Even if I’m not feeling like grousing, cardio is something wonderful for me.  It makes my brain work better, increases my available energy, and burns calories.

 

Anybody else grateful for a pumping heart?

In the Interval...

I am a fan of intervals.  What is not to like about a technique that gives better results in the same amount of time without a lot more pain and suffering?  We all need and want cardio fitness.  Intervals are a great tool for getting us there.

Let’s start with the basics:  interval training involves intervals (fancy that!) in which we work harder.  Classic interval last no longer than a minute, because that’s how long we can work at our maximum effort before we run out of ATP (sorry about the flashbacks to high school biology).  However, longer intervals still have benefits.

 

Sometimes intervals are built in to our workouts.  When we walk or run or bike outside, we discover that the world is not flat.  Those hills we have to climb?  Intervals!  We have to work harder to get to the top.

 

An easy way to build them in when we’re working out somewhere flat is the fartlek.  (If your inner twelve-year-old just snickered, we can be friends.)  To fartlek (heh), we look ahead on our path as we’re walking or running or biking or whatever and choose a landmark, like a big tree or a stop sign on the corner, or a purple house.  We go as fast as we can until we get to that landmark.  Then we choose another one and go at a recovery pace until we get there.  We continue on like that until the end of the workout.

 

Music also provides a great way to build in intervals.  A classic interval strategy would be to go at top speed during the choruses of songs and recover during the verses.  (Back when I used to watch football and had a spin bike in my living room, I’d use commercials as intervals and game play as recovery time.)  Another way to use music for intervals is to choose a characteristic (genre, type of singer, decade) as the trigger for an interval.  We can also choose songs that are our personal sprint songs; whenever those come up in the shuffle, we really amp everything up.

 

I recently learned about a new-to-me way to do intervals for those of us who keep track of things like lap time.  We note the digit of the hundredth of a second and use that, multiplied by 20, to determine how much rest we get before we go again.  So if we finish in a time that ends in .01, we get 20 seconds of rest.  A time that ends in .02 would give us 40 seconds.  A time that ends in .00, though, means we have to go again right now!

 

As always, we want to build up slowly and experiment.  Adding a single interval to a workout does have benefits.  We add another one when we feel like we can handle it.  Eventually, we can spend our whole workout alternating between hard work and recovery intervals (after our warm-up and before our cool-down, of course!).

 

Go play.

By Request: How do I get back to working out safely? (Part 1)

This month, I’m taking requests for things folks want to know about fitness (yes, please!  Ask me questions and I will blog the answers!).

I haven’t been exercising lately.  How do I get back into workouts safely?

 

I’m going to answer this one over two days, one covering cardio and the other weight training.

 

Good news:  bodies are made to move, so we don’t need to freak out about safety as long as we don’t abandon common sense.

 

(One way to answer this question is:  hire me.  My job is to help people reach their fitness goals safely and with as little yucky stuff as possible.)

 

Those of us who don’t want to rush out and join my client list can still get fit safely.  Here’s what I recommend:

 

Start small.  Maybe we’ve wasted six months watching cooking shows and eating DoorDash, but we’re not going to get back from that in one six-hour marathon session.  That is just not a thing.

 

I suggest starting with cardio in the form of a daily brisk walk.  It’s free, requires only decent shoes, and we all already know how to do it.  At first, I prefer seeing people be consistent rather than doing it for a long time:  every day for fifteen minutes is better than an hour twice a week.  We want to build a habit.  As far as intensity is concerned, we’ll know if we’re working hard enough if we can manage to carry on a conversation but singing would be out of the question.  If we feel like we didn’t do anything at all the next day, we probably need to go a little harder.  If we feel like we’d like to dive headfirst into the Advil, we might want to take it a little easier.

 

Each week, we can push a little harder.  The walk might get longer, or it might get faster, or it might incorporate a few hills.  Again, we want to monitor how we feel the next day and adjust as needed.  We also need to remember that some days just go better than others.  A poor night of sleep, some stress at work, an unfortunate breakfast can all affect our performance on any given day.  We need to have compassion for ourselves without totally letting ourselves off the hook.

 

Once we’ve got a cardio base, we can branch out into other forms of cardio if we like:  swimming, running, biking, ellipticalling (is that a word?  It is now.), dancing, roller-blading, whatever.  And we can turn our attention to the weight training side of the equation, which I will discuss tomorrow.

Basics: Cardio (2 of 2)

Yesterday we talked about the very basics of cardio.  Today we’re going to add a key technique, the cardio interval.

Most of us, when we head to the gym in the dark, cold morning, plop ourselves on the spin bike or the treadmill or the stair machine and go at a steady pace until we’re done.  This is a perfectly valid way to work out and if it is working for us, we can carry on.

 

However, those of us who want to progress more quickly, or have already progressed to the point where we are bored, or just want to get out the gym quicker may want to try intervals.  Here’s how they work.  We warm up for five minutes or so.  Then we bump up the pace or incline or resistance for a minute so that we’re working at the very high end of our appropriate range.  At the end of the minute, we return to a pace/incline/resistance that allows us to recover (but still stay in our target heart rate zone) for a minute or so.  Then we repeat the tough minute and the recovery period as many times as we want, ending with a cool down. We can burn an hour’s worth of steady-state calories in half an hour this way AND we improve our cardio function more than just chugging along.

 

A few notes to keep in mind, though.  Many pieces of equipment with programs already on them have an interval program.  If the hard interval is longer than one minute, it’s not really interval training (but it might be fun and we can certainly try it).  The key to interval training is that we work as hard as we possibly can for that minute.  By the end of a minute, we have used up our ATP supplies (remember ATP from biology way back when?  It’s our quick energy cellular power.  We have about a minute’s supply before it’s depleted and we have to give it a minute or so to regroup.).  If we’re working hard enough, we really can’t go longer than a minute without a recovery.  Our bodies will inevitably slow once our ATP is depleted.

 

The recovery interval can vary.  When we first start out with intervals, we might need three or four minutes to recover between intense intervals.  As we get more fit, that time can shorten until we’re doing minute on and minute off.

 

If we are working out outside and don’t want to focus on our watches, we can do our intervals by distance.  We choose a landmark like the end of the block or a really cool tree and go as fast as possible until we get there.  Then we pick another landmark and go slower until we get to that one.  Alternatively, we can choose a route with built-in intervals in the form of hills, which work for walking and running and biking and the like.  Outside intervals may not exactly align with the one minute max and the ATP cycle as discussed above, but they still work.

 

Go play.

Basics: Cardio (1 of 2)

It’s a new year, so we’re going back to basics.  This week I’ll spend two days going over what we need to know about cardio.  Next week, we’ll talk about weights.  The week after that, we’ll discuss Pilates.  Then stretching the week after that.  Finally, in the last week of January, we’ll put it all together and talk about goals.  Why this way?  Because it’s hard to set goals when we don’t have basic information.  It’s worth waiting until the end of the month to set goals because we’ll be equipped to set better goals than we can right this very minute with the knowledge we have.  Ready?  Here we go.

I’m starting with cardio because cardio is a good foundation for everything else we do.  It’s also easy to get started with cardio because nearly all of us can go for a walk.

 

Let’s define what we’re talking about here.  Cardiovascular exercise is movement that makes our hearts beat faster and our lungs work harder.  The benefits of cardio exercise range from boosts in mood and cognitive function to calorie-burning to improved heart health to the ability to go upstairs without feeling like we’re going to die.  We can get cardio exercise by walking, running, skiing, swimming, biking, dancing, skating, and playing a variety of sports.  This list is (obviously) not comprehensive.  If it gets the heart rate up and keeps it there for a good while, it counts.

 

To be effective, we want to get our heart rates up to 65 to 85% of our maximum heart rate.  Those of us who wear fitness trackers or smart watches can ignore the following math:  our gizmos do it for us.  The rest of us can get out the calculator app on our phones.  The quick-and-dirty math for calculating our maximum heart rate is to subtract our age from 220.  I will use myself as the example.  I am 55, so my max heart rate is 220-55, or 165.  Then I use that number to calculate my training range, which is a heart rate between 107 (65% of 165) and 140 (85% of 165).  I can take my own pulse for a minute during a workout to check that I’m working hard enough.  In my experience, it is rare for people to work too hard; when we get above 85% of our maximum heart rate, we feel terrible and slow down.  However, any special snowflakes out there who like to feel terrible might want to check the heart rate to make sure to stay on the safe side of the max.

 

Now that I made everyone do math (sorry!), I will suggest that we don’t need to pay too much attention to the numbers.  As we get moving, we get a feel for how hard we’re working on a given day.  When we quantify that, we get a scale of perceived exertion, which ranges from 0 (equivalent to lying on the couch) to 10 (please shoot me now).  (No, those are not the actual descriptions for the scale numbers, but they get the point across.)  We want to aim for a 7 or 8 (working hard, but we can still cope).  More simply still, we can assess how hard we are working by talking.  If we can still mostly carry on a conversation, we’re all right.  If we can sing, we’re not working hard enough.  If we have to pause our clever response to breathe, we’re working too hard.

 

How long we walk (or run, or rollerskate, or swim, or bike, or Zumba) is another factor we have to consider.  If we haven’t hoisted ourselves out of the comfy chair for the last couple of years, we’re going to start with less time than those of us who just chilled out for a few days over the holiday.  It is better to start slow and easy.  In fact, I’m in favor of the stupidly easy beginning.  So, couch potato friends:  walk five minutes to start.  Ultimately, we want to work up to about 150 minutes per week, which is 30 minutes per day, five days a week.

 

Go play.

Back to Basics

I don’t know about anybody else, but sometimes my life feels kind of overwhelming.  I have so many tasks and responsibilities.  I get so busy and caught up in completing errands and crossing things off.  And suddenly I am not working out.

When that happens, it takes me a little while to notice and then a little while to gather my forces to take action.  And then what I need is to get back to basics.

 

Here are the basics:  do cardio for at least 30 minutes a day and do one weight workout sometime during the week.  I get bonus points for remembering to stretch.  When I have managed that for a couple of weeks, I’m ready to think about making my workouts more ideal for my body.  What that means varies by how I’m feeling, but it might include more weight workouts, different or harder cardio, more Pilates, more yoga.

 

I am a trained professional and sometimes I need to remind myself about the simplest level of working out.  That might mean that everyone else does, too.

 

So:  get in that cardio and lift weights at least once this week.

Why, yes, I AM the funglepress champion of the world

Yesterday I talked a little about montages.  They’re awesome, right?  But in real life, how do we see our progress?

In small steps.  Most of them go forward, but not all of them.

 

With our cardio workouts, we don’t want to increase our time by more than about 10 percent per week.  If that’s too mathy, we can just add a minute a week until we get to our target time.  When we want to increase our intensity, our best choice is to add in a minute of high intensity here and there, either by going faster or adding incline or resistance. 

 

With weights, we want to choose a weight that barely allows us to complete a set of reps.  When completing the set isn’t hard anymore, we increase the weight and see how many reps we can do with good form, even if that is fewer than we were doing before.  For example, let’s say we start doing funglepresses (yes, I made that up so no one has any judgy opinions about the exercise) with 5 pound weights.  After a couple workouts, it's easy to complete ten reps.  We trade our 5s in for 8s, but now we can only do six good-looking reps.  Over the next weeks, we work up to ten reps with the 8s.  When we switch to 10s, we have to drop back to four reps.  And so on until we are eventually, 25 years later, doing our funglepresses with 3 tons.

 

In either scenario, cardio or weights, we will have days when we need to back off.  Maybe the baby kept us up all night and all we can manage is five minutes of random stumbling on the treadmill.  Or we foolishly offered to help our friend move and all her furniture is solid oak, so we’re lucky to complete a single funglepress with 3 pound weights.  This is all part of the process.  Stuff happens.  We listen to our bodies and we do the right amount of work for this day.

 

Go play.

Sadly, workouts are rarely like sundaes

Every once in a while, I have a conversation that reminds me that I need to review the basics of something.  Someone recently asked me about working more on cardio.  This person basically forgot how interval training works, so I’m going to go over it for everyone.

What we are doing when we do cardio training is teaching our hearts and lungs to recover more quickly from exertion.  We do need some base cardio endurance for things like an unexpectedly long or steep hike, or surprise stairs.  We do want to be able to finish the dog walk without passing out.  One way to get that basic endurance is to do those things.  Walk for half an hour.  Hop on a bike or spin bike or elliptical trainer.  Go for a run.  This is called steady state cardio training.  We go at about the same speed for the whole time we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing.  It is a great way to begin, but not a great way to keep going forever.  Even people who do endurance events like century rides and marathons don’t just ride or run forever and think they’ve got enough training.

 

What we want to do, once we have enough oomph built up to do maybe fifteen minutes of steady-state cardio like brisk walking, is add intervals.  Intervals are short bursts of more intense work sprinkled across the workout.  If the workout were a sundae, intervals are the jimmies.

 

If we are working out on gym equipment, chances are that the machine already has a built-in interval program.  Chances are it is also not optimal, but it is an all right place to start.  A lot of those pre-programmed interval workouts have intervals that are too long—two of three minutes of harder work followed by the same amount of recovery.  Again, this is not a bad way to try interval training, but there is an easier way.

 

Whatever cardio thing we are doing, once we are warmed up, we want to add short (about a minute) bursts of intense activity to them.  So if we are fairly new to working out and we are doing a neighborhood walk for cardio, we go at our usual brisk pace until we’re warmed up.  Then we go as fast as we can to the end of the next block.  We slow back down until our heart rate and breathing recover, and then we do it again.  That minute is important, because in a minute we use up all our readily available quick-burn energy.  The other energy pathways available to us aren’t as easy to access and take more time.  We want to use the quick stuff and then give it a chance to refuel before burning it again.

 

The science shows that this kind of training improves general cardio fitness faster than steady state endurance cardio.  That means that when we do interval training, we are automatically making that steady state cardio easier.

 

Short version:  warm up; do a fast minute; do a slower minute or two; do a fast minute; do a slow minute or two; repeat until time to cool down; cool down; rest.

Scheduling 101

Over the last weeks, we have gone over all the different kinds of work we need to incorporate into our fitness routines.  It’s a lot, so we might feel a little overwhelmed about how we are going to manage to do fitness and anything else in our lives, too.

 

Never fear!  Today I’m going to talk about scheduling and how to make it all work together.

 

One traditional way to make it all fit is to stagger workouts.  We do our cardio every day and add in strength training with some stretching and balance work on two days a week.  Maybe on one day we forego the cardio and take a yoga or Pilates class to increase our commitment to flexibility and balance.  It’s perfectly workable and gives our weight-training muscles a chance to rest.

 

However, there are a couple of tweaks to the traditional system that make it work better in less time.  May I introduce everyone to my two favorite things:  interval training and circuit training.

 

Interval training (sometimes called High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT) allows us to burn more calories and improve our cardio fitness in less time.  Once we are warmed up, we intersperse whatever cardio thing we are doing with bursts of about a minute of going as fast and/or hard as we can.  If we are, say, walking on a treadmill, we increase the incline and/or speed for a minute.  Then we recover for a minute or two and repeat.  If we are biking, we add hills.  If we are swimming, we go faster.  Our hour-long workout becomes half an hour.  What’s not to like?

 

When we combine this concept with circuit training on our two or three days a week that we plan to do strength training, we get even more efficient.  We combine our weight work with cardio intervals and we’re done with both cardio and strength in 45 minutes.  (Note:  the workouts I post every Monday are designed on this principle, so we have plenty of resources available!)  With a bit of planning, we can ensure that we are building in balance moves right there in the circuit.  This is why there are always core moves and often asymmetric or single-leg versions of exercises included in the workouts I write.

 

So a weekly workout plan might look like this:

 

Monday: half hour interval cardio, 5-10 minutes stretching

Tuesday:  circuit strength training interval workout, 5-10 minutes stretching

Wednesday: same as Monday

Thursday:  same as Tuesday

Friday:  same as Monday

Saturday: Pilates or yoga

Sunday: gentle walk and stretching

 

We’re done in under an hour every day except possibly Saturday, depending on class length.

 

Go play.

Cardio 101

Here we are in the new year, ready to be new people (maybe).  In fitness, that probably starts with some cardio.  I pretty much always tell folks to begin with cardio.  The benefits of cardio training in itself are many, as I keep repeating:  improved mood, better brain function, greater heart health, and the like. 

For people just starting (or re-starting) their fitness journey, cardio is a good first step for additional reasons.  First, cardio is super easily available and doesn’t have to use equipment.  Nearly all of us can go for a walk.  Because of the aforementioned mood benefits, building a cardio habit tends to be slightly easier for most of us.  When something makes us feel good, we tend to do it again.  Our very first goal on our fitness journey is building a fitness habit and we start with the simple stuff.  Finally, building up a cardio fitness base will allow us to progress faster when we get to the weight training portion of the show.

 

Now that we’ve explored why, let’s talk how.  I believe in making ridiculously easy goals and meeting them, so I suggest committing to a five minute walk seven days for a week.  We can all find five minutes, so there is really no excuse.  It is all right to do a little bit more, but here’s the deal:  we’re committing for all seven days.  We don’t get to do a 35 minute walk on the first day and call it done.  The point is to build the habit.

 

Eventually, we work ourselves up to doing a total of 150 minutes of cardio a week.  That’s the recommendation for Americans.  That works out to five 30 minute sessions a week.  However, I personally believe that to keep our habits in place we need to do something every day.  A rest day is just a day with a significantly less intense workout in it.

 

We will notice, as we go along, that things that used to be really hard get easier.  Our bodies change in response to challenge, so when what we are doing gets easy, we need to make it harder.  We have choices about how to do that.  We can, with cardio, do it for more time, do it faster, or choose a harder route (e.g., with hills or intervals).  (Note:  if swimming is your cardio of choice, it is very hard to find hills.)  What we want to ensure is that we work hard enough that we can still carry on a conversation (again, probably not while swimming), but singing is not manageable.

 

Make sense?  If not, ask me!

This fish is feeling judgy, but I understand

Like everyone else, I have times when I’m working out more and times when I am working out less.  I get enthusiastic about a particular kind of workout and I ignore some other kind.  That said, my recent experience has reinforced the idea that consistency is really a virtue.

 

Now when I say that we need to be consistent, I definitely do not mean that we pick a workout and we do it every day for the rest of our lives.  Among other problems, it would bore us to death.  What I do mean is that we need to make sure that we get in all our different kinds of work.

 

Lately, I’ve been super excited about playing pickleball.  It’s fun, it’s social, and it gets my heart rate up.  I may have let my enthusiasm distract me from the fact that I need to do my strength training and my core/balance/flexibility work.  I got back to doing Pilates last week and oh dear do I have some ground to regain.  I returned to my weight lifting earlier, but again, I noticed the difference.

 

Of course, everyone else is probably way more organized and conscientious than I am, so this might not be a relatable problem.  Worst case, y’all get a good laugh at my expense and I’m cool with that.  However, if you, too, have slipped a little, let my example gently encourage you to get back to balancing out the workouts you’re enthusiastic about with the other ones you need to be doing, too.

 

Go play.

Forget about it

We’re back from the holiday weekend.  Now we’re going to forget about it.  No, not the great memories we made or the valuable lessons we learned about what not to ask Uncle Jerome at the dinner table; we need to keep those things.

 

We’re going to forget what we ate, how much pie we put away, and how little exercise we got.

 

We are going to start again, today, with the workout in front of us.  We’re going to eat our normal healthy foods.

 

There will be no punitive workouts and no one is being restricted to just bread and water.  Fitness, in the form of healthy eating and movement, is a gift we give our bodies.  We do it because we want to take care of ourselves, not because we think we are horrible people who deserve to suffer.

 

Go play.

It's Wednesday and Captain Obvious Is Here

It seems like I feel like Captain Obvious about once a week.  Today’s the day this week.  My pearl of obvious wisdom this time is:  we all have strengths and weaknesses.

 

It’s fun to play to our strengths.  Some of us are fast; some of us are strong; some of us are flexible.  Fast people like to finish first.  Strong people like to have the opportunity to display their strength.  Flexible people show off the way they can scratch the tops of their heads with their big toes, or whatever it is that flexible people do (I am not one, so I am simply admiring and jealous when they bend like that.).  Of course we want to continue to build on our strengths.

 

But.

 

We also have to spend some time on our weaknesses.  I may never be able to scratch the top of my head with my big toe, but if I don’t spend at least a little time working on flexibility, I’ll be lucky if I bend at all.

 

Nearly everything we do in fitness is a combination of cardio, strength, and flexibility.  We can have a preferred mode among the three, but we can’t avoid the others forever.

 

Go play.

Something Made New

Last week I did something new.  One of my friends invited me to go electric biking with her.  I don’t have an electric bike, but her husband kindly loaned me his for the occasion.

 

Was it the same as biking on my road bike or my mountain bike?  No.  But it reminded me about how much fun bikes can be.  The short version of why I don’t bike much anymore is that it hurts my body in a lot of places.  The electric bike’s geometry and the little bit of assist it gave me (I could have used more, but I have legs for a reason and I’m going to use them!) made it possible for me to go without my arms falling off and without having to suffer my way up hills.

 

There are many possible lessons to take from this, and not all of them involve shopping.  One is that finding a way to modify the things we want to do to make them workable for our bodies is a worthwhile endeavor.  Another is that getting a glimpse of success can motivate us to put in the work to get there (yes, I now want to take my non-electric bikes out for more quality time).

 

Joy is my favorite result from movement.

Feedback

I love food.  I also love movement.  This is good, because healthy people need to eat and exercise.

 

Like all loves, we need to avoid obsessive love of either food or exercise.  We can’t out-exercise poor eating habits and no amount of correct eating can make us fit without getting off the couch occasionally.

 

The good news is that our bodies like to give us feedback.  We do have to listen to them, though, to get the messages.  Sometimes the messages are obvious, like the day after we helped a friend move and our muscles hate us—we overdid it.  Similarly, the day after too much birthday cake, we know we have made a mistake. 

 

Other times, the messages are more subtle.  We’re a little crabby and it’s because our guts aren’t as fond of dairy as they used to be, or we’re kind of stiff and we realize it has been a few days since we remembered to stretch after our workouts.

 

Tune in.  Practice listening to the body and see what happens.

Balance

When we work out, we are constantly seeking balance, literally and figuratively. 

Literally, as we move, we are using our core musculature to stabilize ourselves so we don’t fall, no matter what our arms and legs happen to be doing.  This happens whether we are thinking about it or not, but we can make a conscious effort to do asymmetric exercises to improve our skill more intentionally.

 

We’re also balancing a bunch of abstract concepts as we plan and execute our workouts.  We have to work enough and rest enough.  We need to work the top and bottom halves of the body, as well as the right and left halves.  We need to do our cardio, but also our weight training (oh, yeah:  and flexibility!).  We need to fit all of this stuff in the limited time we have available so we can live the rest of our lives.

 

For both the literal and figurative challenges, the answer is the same:  we need to know where our center is.  When we strengthen our cores and our commitment to our core values, the balance improves.

 

Go play.

Don't Skip

Sometimes life gets a little crazy.  We take on extra tasks at work, or we have family issues arise, or we get a new puppy, or any number of other things.  We get stressed.  We feel like there’s not enough time.  And we seriously consider skipping our workouts.

 

Let’s do them anyway.  Here’s why.

 

First, it’s the oxygen mask thing.  We have to take care of ourselves in order to do all those other things we are supposed to do.  If we neglect our health, we aren’t going to last long enough to finish that important project or help that kid or train that puppy.  Sometimes that might not feel all that motivational because, really, it would be nice if someone else dealt with those things; fortunately, I have another good reason.

 

Endorphins.  When we work out, our body feels better and our brains do, too.  We get all those natural feel-good chemicals flowing and we end up less stressed out, more cheerful.  We may not be able to take things out on our coworkers or family or pets, but we can certainly take stuff out on the weights; they don’t mind.

 

For bonus points, we also get stronger when we work out.  Strength is a useful skill for many tasks in the gym and in the wider world.

 

Go play.

Time IN Workouts

Yesterday I wrote about why working out is good time management.  Today I want to talk about time management within our workouts.

 

When we consider all the things we’re supposed to fit into our workouts, it can be overwhelming.  How are we supposed to get in cardio and weights and balance and flexibility and ever manage to leave the gym?

 

There are a couple of ways.  One is that we plan to do different things on different days.  Maybe we focus on cardio three days a week, weights on two, and flexibility and balance on one, leaving ourselves one rest day.  That’s a workable system, but I have one I like better.

 

The most efficient way to hit all our fitness needs is by circuit training.  By incorporating cardio intervals into a weight circuit that includes asymmetric exercises like single leg squats, we can get everything we need in about 45 minutes, leaving five to fifteen for stretching.  This is the principle behind the workouts I post every Monday.

 

The beauty of a circuit is that it is infinitely adaptable.  Those of us who need more balance work can do it.  Those of us who want to build endurance can choose to do more reps with lighter weights.  Cardio enthusiasts can add more intervals.  Best of all, the easily-bored can change it up as often as we like.

 

Go play.

Stressing the Strategies

All of us face stressful times every once in a while.  (If stress gets chronic, that’s a whole different story for another day.)  It’s really easy to decide that we’re going to cope with the stress with a pint of ice cream on the couch, but if we can manage it, there are better options.

 

One of those options is making sure we get in some cardio.  Cardio improves mood, helps us sleep better, and makes our brains work more effectively.  We get bonus stress-busting points if we can take our cardio outside in the fresh air, so stressful times are a great time to go for a walk or a run or a swim.

 

Another important self-care option when we are under stress (or any time, really) is making sure we drink our water.  Dehydrated people are crabby people.  Or, to put it another way, we don’t need our bodies to be stressed while our minds are already trying to cope with stress.  Feeding ourselves healthy food on a regular basis helps, too.

 

Finally, stress is tiring.  We are allowed to rest.  In stressful times, it is all right to nap and to do what we can to ensure that we get our full nights of sleep.

 

Fitness pretty much comes down to this:  move, eat, drink, and rest.

Don't Die

The goal of fitness, in the largest sense, is promoting optimal health.  I like to focus on the positives, but today, I want to discuss some of the negative things that fitness helps us avoid.  Our vocabulary word is comorbidities.

 

Comorbidities are conditions that make it difficult for us to be healthy.  There are lots of them, but here are a few of the most common and how fitness helps us reduce them.

 

Heart disease is a very common comorbidity.  When we do our cardio exercise, we are reducing our susceptibility to clogged arteries and heart attack.  We also improve our lung function, which helps us avoid things like COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).

 

Type 2 Diabetes is another increasingly common comorbidity.  Both cardio and weight training help keep this one away.  Cardio increases glucose tolerance in the body and weight training increases lean body mass.

 

While I believe that healthy bodies come in every size, excess body weight can, in some circumstances, put us at higher risk, so overweight is considered a comorbidity.  Our work at the gym helps us avoid overweight or reduce it when we also work on eating foods that are good for us.

 

We want to have long, happy, and fun lives.  Working on our fitness now will help us live better.