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FIT FOR PURPOS
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The hardest part of taking enough exercise may well be putting in the necessary time and effort — but Louise Cole has some tips that will make fitness much easier.
If you want to increase your fitness levels, the truth about exercise is brutally simpledo more. Th at said, there are many ways in which you can choose forms of exercise that will suit your purpose and your body.
For most of us, Olympic performance or world-class record-breaking isn't necessary.We just want to look and feel a little better, tire a little less easily and hopefully live a little longer. The best way to achieve this is to look at your whole body. Don 't just think calorie-burning and weight loss:don't just think about improving your cardiovascular efficiencythat's how hard your engine can work; and don't waste time preening muscles for the mirrors in the gym. If you pick a range of simple exercises, rather than one, you will benefit all over, with far less effort and no risk. Pick just one activity weightlifting or running for instance and you can easily overwork some muscles and never get near to using others.
Types of fitness
There are different aspects to fitness strength, stamina and suppleness.Strength speaks for itself; stamina depends on how efficiently your heart and lungs work to provide oxygen and how well nourished and hydrated your muscles fibres are. All muscles work by contractionbunches of muscle fibres shorten and tug on the bones to which they are attached to cause movement.To sustain effort, the muscle fibres contract in series throughout the muscle but if you run out of nutrients, or the oxygen to burn them,you will run out of energy.
Within a few minutes of hard physical work the body is no longer gaining enough oxygen to service the muscles' energy requirements just by breathing in it switches to anaerobic respiration, which takes energy from long chain sugar stores around the body.This produces byproducts though, which clog the muscle and can exhaust it. Oxygen is needed to cleanse this away -so,while exercising, the body builds up an oxygen debt.This means you continue to pant hard after exercise while the body uses the oxygen to get rid of lactic acid. one of these byproducts. How quickly your breathing returns to normal depends on how efficient your heart and lungs are, another key indicator of stamina.
The third fitness keyword is supplenessflexibility can stop you hurting yourself.All bodily movements rely on one muscle pulling and another relaxing in order to allow the bone to move away. Put your hand around your upper arm and flex your elbow. As your bleep grows, your triceps at the back get longer.
When muscles become tight or weak they cannot give and take easilysudden movement or force on them or from their partner muscle and can cause them to tearlifis is why flexibility is important to every one not only if you're doing sport.
How to choose sports
One of the simplest keys to improving performance is to work on those things we find hardest. If you have no postural problems and fairly good cardio-vascular capacity for instance, then a little light running might be easy for you but it won't improve your flexibility or strength.
Choose simple things. If you never walk.try walking briskly for 10 minutes a day; if walking is no challenge try jogging, or climbing stairs.
Try to alternate your activities. Using muscles hard can cause lots of micro-tears in the tissue, which is why we feel sore the day after sport. Doing a different exercise will allow these to heal while working the body ma different way.
Structuring a programme
If you are doing anything more strenuous than going for a walk, you will need to warm up. It's exactly the same as letting an engine idle for a few minutes on a cold day to make sure everything is lubricated before you set off. Muscles need nutrients from the bloodstream, so you must give the nervous system clear signals that you want the blood to flow to the muscles in abundance. It won't if you've been sitting in an office or a cab for a long time.The body is an economical machine. It doesn't maintain strength in muscles that never get used and it doesn't work hard on super supplies that don't seem needed. Warm ups are a warning system that the demands you have been making are about to change.
How to stretch
Before you exercise, keep moving.The movement can be gentle, it can be flowing, it can move the body a little further into a position each time. But don't hold stretches.Static stretching before you exercise sends signals to the muscles to relax and the nerves take a temporary holiday.Then when you want them to work they won't be as powerful as before.
Working hard
Unless you want to get into the fiddle of using a heart monitor and let's face it they're great toys for boys if you're that way inclined use the perceived rate of exertion (PRE) register. This is simply your relative perception of how hard you are working. If sitting in a chair is one and running a steep hillside 10, then aim for activities that let you alternate between a level at which you are comfortable and a couple of minutes working yourself harder. Drop the pace back to a two or a three for a while and then exert yourself a tittle.
Burning fat and other complications
It's easy to get lost in training heart rates, fatburning and a whole heap of other concepts that can be profoundly unhelpful to anyone who isn't an exercise fashionista.The harder you work, the more energy your body uses. Running therefore uses more energy than walking. Both burn fat and carbohydrate, but in different ratioshigh energy work actually burns more of both, but proportionately less fat because the body will take the most rapidl: available energy for such hard work. So running is considered a non-fat burning exercise by some, but in truth it will still make you lose weight more quickly.