The Benefits of Exercise

We are often told that exercise is good for us however the phrase “good for us” is a bit vague and considering the effort, motivation and dedication often required to become a regular exerciser, surely being told it’s “good for us” needs to be expanded on.

In this article, I want to list the benefits of exercise and hopefully, in turn, help raise your motivation levels and make it easier to stay on the straight and narrow road to better health and fitness!

There are many benefits associated with regular exercise and they can be broadly divided into two categories – physical and psychological. Some of these benefits may be a bit of both so I’ve listed them according to my interpretation…

Let’s get physical!
The human body consists of molecules, chemicals, minerals, cells, tissue, organs, bodily systems, muscles, bones, blood and numerous other components – all of which benefit from regular appropriate exercise. Some of the physical benefits of exercise include:

Improved cardiovascular health (cardiovascular referring to the heart and lungs)
Improved cardiovascular fitness
Improved circulation to extremities (no more cold feet!)
Reduced likelihood of developing varicose veins
Reduced blood pressure
Reduced likelihood of suffering heart attacks and strokes
Lowered resting heart rate
Improved blood lipid profiles
Increased energy expenditure leading to lowered body fat levels
Reduced stress levels/stress management
Lowered risk of developing diabetes and lowered resting blood glucose levels
Lowered incidence of all cause mortality
Improved muscle tone
Increased muscular strength, power and endurance
Greater muscular flexibility
Increased range of movement at major joints
Increased bone density & decreased risk of Osteoporosis
Stronger ligaments and tendons
Improved co-ordination, balance and proprioception
Increase immune system efficiency
Improved posture
Lowered incidence of non-specific back pain
Increased resistance to fatigue
More energy for day to day activities

Are you mental?
Many people are very surprised to learn that exercise has a very positive effect on our psychological state also. A healthy body and a healthy mind often go hand in hand…

Elevated mood state due to release of exercise induced endorphins
Increase mental focus
Provides a tremendous feeling of satisfaction and achievement
Lowered stress levels
Reduced likelihood of developing depression
Increased self confidence
More positive outlook on life – a “can do” attitude
A healthier attitude towards food
Greater self awareness

That’s not all folks!
And if those reasons weren’t enough, here are a few more often forgotten benefits of being fit, healthy and a regular exerciser:

Exercise provides us with a great opportunity to increase our social circle
Makes us more attractive to the opposite sex
Can help develop both self sufficiency and team work
Gives us more latitude with what we choose to eat
Teaches us to be goal orientated
Improved time management, organization and planning ability
Improved quality and enjoyment of life!

Never too late...
Generally, people are living considerably longer than they used to. This gives the impression that society is now healthier than ever before. Sadly this is not the case. Chronic degenerative diseases plague modern man, as does obesity and other conditions associated with poor nutrition as inactivity. Modern medicine is now so advanced that we can keep people alive longer and control symptoms with medication. However, this long life is often accompanied by poor quality of life, disability and unpleasant side effects from medication. People are living considerably longer than their predecessors but their quality and enjoyment of life is much lower than it could be. Personally, I can’t imagine a worse fate than living a long time but losing quality of life. It’s never too late to begin experiencing the benefits of exercise – the body is a remarkable machine which adapts readily to change and has this capacity long into our twilight years. Improved fitness, strength and health are there fir the taking!

How to use this information?
The next time you find your self tempted to skip a workout, eat junk food or are not sure if you should even begin trying to be more physically active, try this exercise…

Divide a piece of paper into two with a vertical line. This is your “Benefit versus Cost” list. On the left hand side, write the heading “Benefits” and on the right hand side write the heading “Costs”. List as many benefits as you can think of including the ones listed above and any others you can think of. On the other side, make a note of any costs you feel are associated with maintaining a healthy lifestyle. By cost, I don’t just list financial implications, but the cost in terms of time, sacrifices and changed behaviours.

In this exercise, in the majority of cases the benefits will always greatly out weight the costs. Sure, you may have to cut back on pizza night form three times a week to once a month, you might find you need to get up forty five minutes earlier, you might miss having beers with your friends after work but compared to what you’ll be getting in return, the sacrifices you’ll make are really very small indeed!

So, the next time someone says “why do you bother with all that exercise stuff”, reach into your pocket, get your “Benefit versus cost” list out and then reel of all the great things you are getting back in return for your investment.

The ancient Greeks were a clever bunch and had a great many sayings and expressions that are as true today as they were when they were first uttered by Socrates, Hippocrates and the other fathers of modern knowledge.

One of my favourites is this “Make time for exercises, or make time to be ill”.

Right, I’m off for a workout!!!

Fitter, faster, stronger, leaner!

“Learn how to go from your current physical performance levels to new levels by making logical progressions in your workouts!”

It’s Monday, so it must be chest day…5 sets of bench press, 3 sets of dumbbell flies, 2 sets of dips and a couple of sets of press ups to finish the workout – same workout as last week, and the week before, using the same weights you always use and the same rep scheme. Or is it cardio day? Run 3 miles in 30 minutes, just like last week and the week before. Or is it Body Pump class today? Same work out as always, same weights, same exercises, same duration? Maybe you don’t even know what you did in last week’s workouts? Do you go to the gym and do whatever your training partner suggests or just do what you feel like doing (The Weider Instinctive Principle!!!)

If any of these scenarios sound familiar to you you’re not alone. Look around the majority of gyms and health clubs and you’ll see vast numbers of people doing the same training, week in and week out. When they look in the mirror they see the same old reflexion staring right back them…their physiques or figures haven’t changed in ages, their fitness improvements have stalled and they have the same strength today as they did this time last year.

There is an old saying in exercise – “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got”.

When they started their current workout routine what they were doing will have worked. It provided overload and sufficient training stimulus to force their bodies to adapt, to change, to improve. The thing is the human body is lazy! Once it can comfortably perform the activities it is being asked to do, it ceases making adaptations and we stop getting the benefits we seek from exercise. If we don’t try to progress our workouts, the very most we can expect is to maintain our current physical condition and the worse case scenario is that we actually lose fitness as our body becomes ultra-efficient at the exercises we perform which in turn lowers the training effect of our training sessions. It takes the body 3-6 weeks to adapt to a stressor like exercise. After that, it takes a new stressor to keep the body adapting and improving.

People stay with the same exercise regime for a number of reasons – partly physical and partly psychological. Examine this list and see if any of the points relate to you and your current workout situation:-

You’re good at all the exercises and don’t want to be seen doing things you aren’t good at.

The programme you are on was written by an expert so it must work.

Your current programme worked initially so it will work again if you stick with it long enough.

You only know a handful of exercises and have limited knowledge of programme design.

You are comfortable with your routine and are reluctant to change it.

Whatever your reason for not changing your routine I can’t stress enough that unless you do something different from time to time you are doomed to little or no progress!!! You are literally wasting your time in the gym! So if you want to get fitter, faster, stronger or leaner we have to force our bodies to adapt and improve – and that means we have to shake up our workouts on a regular basis.

I’m often asked “does it (exercise) ever get any easier?” The answer is a resounding “NO!” To see progress in our fitness levels, there needs to be a consistent trend of increased workload/work rate. Exercise isn’t easier the fitter we get – we just develop a greater work capacity.

In the rest of this article, I want to tell you about the “training variables” you can use to keep your workouts fresh, interesting and above all productive and discuss the importance of record keeping to keep us on the road to improved performance and appearance. So, grab your shovel because we have a rut to dig our selves out of!

Progression – the key to long term progress.

Making progress in our workouts requires the manipulation of the “training variables” – the characteristics of our workouts. By making changes to one or more of the training variables on a regular basis we can keep making steady progress towards our genetic potential for physical fitness. Let’s look at each of the training variables in turn:-

Resistance Training Variables – things we can change about the way we train with weights.

Number of exercises per muscle group – can be increased or decreased

Number of sets per exercise and per workout – can be increased or decreased

Target repetition range – higher reps/low weight = more muscular endurance specific, lower reps/greater weight = more strength specific

Loading – increasing the weight used for each exercise to develop greater strength

Recovery period between sets – can be lowered to increase workout density (more sets possible per workout) or to challenge recovery ability

Workout frequency – train more often

Workout duration – train for longer

Movement speed – can be increased to promote power development or decreased to extend the duration of a given exercise (referred to as Time Under Tension or TUT)

Different exercises – e.g. trading barbell bench press with dumbbell bench press

Stable based exercises to unstable – e.g. from machine based exercises to free weight exercises to challenge co-ordination and balance

Simple exercises to more complex ones – e.g. from single joint exercises to multi joint exercises

Exercise order - change the order of exercises performed in the session and training week

Training systems – employ drop sets, super sets, forced reps, pre/post exhaust etc

Split routines – split body parts up differently on a regular basis e.g. legs on Monday and not chest!

Changing any one of the above variables will result in a new stimulus which our bodies will have to adapt to resulting in improvements in fitness. With so many variables to choose from some restraint needs to be exercised so as not to change too much at the same time. Rather than randomly shake our workouts up, we want to employ a couple of the exercise variables for a period of 3-6 weeks and then, once we have adapted to the new stresses of our modified work out, make use of a couple more of the variables thereafter. For example, for 3 weeks focus on increasing the amount of weight used in each exercise, then for a further 3 weeks try to perform more reps with the weight constant, and then reduce the rest intervals gradually over the next 3 weeks and so on. By making small but significant changes on a regular basis we guarantee continued improvements in our fitness levels – up to our genetic potential.

Aerobic Training Variables – things we can change about the way we do our cardio.

As with resistance training, there are a number of things we can do to make our cardiovascular exercise more productive and therefore improve our aerobic fitness to new higher levels. By implementing the following, we can make sure that the dreaded plateau is a thing of the past.

Frequency – exercise more often

Intensity – work at a higher percentage of maximum Heart rate

Duration – exercise for longer periods of time/cover greater distances

Speed – run/cycle/swim/step/row at a faster rate

Intervals – employ interval training in place of steady state cardio*

Terrain – run/walk/cycle on different surfaces

Hill work – purposely seek out hillier routes to walk, cycle or run

Modality – select different aerobic training methods e.g. run instead of swim

Add resistance – use weighted vests, ankle weights or back packs

Employ an aerobic training method – e.g. fartlek, FCR or LSD)**

*Interval training – periods of high intensity work interspaced with periods of low intensity recoveries e.g. run hard for 60 seconds, jog for 120 seconds and repeat
**Fartlek – mixed speeds within a training session performed randomly, FCR – Fast Continuous Running…aerobic exercise performed at high levels of intensity for shorter periods of time, LCD – Long Slow Distance…Continuous aerobic exercise performed at a comfortable pace for extended periods of time

As with our resistance training variables, it’s a good idea to focus on one or two of the above options for a few weeks before selecting other variables from the list. Trying to make too many changes at once is likely to be too dramatic a change and result in exhaustion and possibly injury. It is also worth bearing in mind that it is recommended that increases in duration/distance per workout and per training week be limited to approximately 10%. In other words, if your current longest run is 3 miles, don’t increase your mileage up to 4 miles over night but increase the distance to by around 400 – 500 metres to avoid potential overuse injuries.

“If we are going to succeed, we need to plan for success” & “Failing to plan is planning to fail”

Improvements in physical fitness don’t happen by accident. They are a direct result of the application of consistent and sustained effort, good eating habits and appropriate rest. If we have no real plan, we have much less chance of making the progress we are looking for.

When thinking about exercise, it’s necessary to think long term – not just tomorrow, next week or next month, but next year and the year after. How are you going to take your current level of exercise and fitness on from the here-and-now to your ultimate fitness goal? The answer is to make a plan.

They say a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, but if those initial steps are in the wrong direction then we’ll never get to our destination. It is necessary to “reverse engineer” our journey from where we want to be to where we are now so we can plot our route to ultimate success.

So – a few questions…write down the answers:

What is your ultimate fitness goal? (lose fat, run a marathon, make it to the 1st team etc)

Where are you currently in relation to your ultimate fitness goal? (score out of 10)

How committed are you to achieving your goal? (score out of 10)

How much time can you dedicate to your goal? (list the hours per week)

What are the possible barriers you might encounter during your quest for success? (make a list)

How can you remove those barriers? (write down solutions to the above list)

What/who are your allies in reaching your goal? (Who can help you?)

Once you have answers for the above questions, you are well on your way to making a plan of battle to take you to your goal.

Next – we need to break down the ultimate fitness goal into smaller bite sized chunks. Our ultimate goal is probably a long term goal…months or possibly years away. That’s a very long time to remain motivated. To help keep us focused on the prize, it’s worth breaking our main goal down into several sub-goals which are more readily achievable.

To give you an example – let’s say your goal is to run a marathon (26 miles) but currently your longest run is 6 miles. That means you have to run a whole 20 miles further to reach you goal. For many people, that might seem like a daunting if not impossible task! Instead, let’s break that ultimate goal down into more manageable chunks…

1st sub goal – run 10 miles
2nd sub goal – run a half marathon (13 miles)
3rd sub goal – run 17 miles
4th sub goal – run 21 miles
Ultimate goal – run a marathon

By breaking down our ultimate goal into smaller bite sized chunks, we will experience numerous minor successes on the way to realisation of our end goal. This promotes adherence, maintains enthusiasm and improves our success potential dramatically.

To train smarter, think SMARTER!

Once you have decided upon your goals, apply the acronym SMARTER to them.

SMARTER stands for:-

Specific – put a numerical value to what you are trying to achieve

Measurable – make sure you can prove success by hitting numerical targets e.g. body fat %

Achievable – is your goal feasible? Do you have the necessary resources to allow success?

Realistic – can it be done in the time available? Are there many barriers to overcome?

Time bound – set a dead line when you expect to achieve success

Enjoyable – if it’s not you are less likely to stick to it

Recorded – write it all down, tell your friends, make your goals public property! It makes it much harder to drop out if you know people are interested in your progress!

By applying SMARTER to the goals we set for ourselves we improve the likelihood of succeeding massively.

Training Diaries - No more wasted workouts!

I am an absolute believer in the power of a training diary. I have kept training diaries for my entire exercising life and rely on them constantly to help me plan my next phase of training. A training diary will provide you with numerical evidence of previous workouts performed, allow you to track improvements, see what has worked well for you and what has been less successful, show consistency and highlight lapses as well as improving focus as you record your performance from workout to workout.

By making use of a training diary, you’ll never go into the gym and be saying to your self “Now, what shall I do today?” Every workout will be productive and specific to your goals.

Personally, I use A5 sized ring bound note books as training diaries although I know you can buy fancy programmes for your computer. Alternatively, if you are so inclined, you could even design excel spread sheets. Regardless of what method you choose, keeping a training diary is one of the most useful tools we have available to keep ourselves motivated and focused.

By utilizing the information in your training diary, you can plan your next workout based on how your previous workout went. Make a note of which exercises you performed, which exercises which need increased resistance, reps achieved with a given resistance, number of sets performed, rest intervals used, settings on cardio machines, durations and heart rates of CV exercise, total duration of each workout, how you felt etc. By having all this information to hand, we can use the training variables discussed earlier to push our selves onwards and upwards towards out ultimate fitness goals.

So, the take home points for continued exercise progress are:-

1) Whatever you are doing now, you need to change in the near future
2) Manipulate the training variables regularly to promote progression
3) Set goals and work towards them
4) Make long term plans for success
5) Keep a training diary to measure your success and keep you focused

By following these 5 guidelines, your ultimate fitness goal isn’t just a dream, but a reality well within your grasp!

Patrick Dale
http://www.solar-fitness.com/

7 strategies for developing the exercise habit

I am a life long exerciser – I can honestly say that I have been exercising all of my adult life (some 20 years) and for a fair amount of my childhood too. During that time, my efforts have been consistent, regular and productive. As a result I have achieved a reasonable level of success in many sports ranging from rugby to trampolining, to athletics to rock climbing.

The one thing that has been a constant companion throughout this long training career is I have always needed to find ways to motivate my self. It has never been easy to drag my self into the gym at 6am, or out to run at 10pm but somehow, almost every time, I have done it.

Without realizing it, I made exercising a lifelong habit and now enjoy the fruits of those endeavors – above average muscle mass, lower than average body fat, sufficient strength for all everyday activities, muscular endurance which allows me to perform physical tasks for prolonged periods of time, adequate CV fitness that allows me to run about as far as I will ever want to, not to mention lowered incidence of illness and disease compared to my peers, high energy levels and the luxury of knowing I will probably enjoy these benefits long into my twilight years.

People often say to me “oh but it’s so easy for you!” but I can assure you it isn’t. Training never gets any easier – that’s a fallacy! You merely get fitter and work harder. I feel the same discomfort as a beginner exerciser, get out of breath in the same way a unfit person would and weights feel heavy to me as they would to a person with less strength. I just have a greater work capacity that allows me to work at higher levels of output – however, it’s still as hard as the first time I ran around the block as an eight year old training for my first sports day. And yes – that feeling of sore muscles beginners get after starting a new exercise routine (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS) – I get that too … at least a couple of times a week!

Everyday, there are things I would rather be doing than sweating in the gym or panting out on the road, like watching TV, reading, sleeping, meeting my friends or just chilling out eating junk food…but the difference between me and a non-exerciser is that I “just do it” to quote Nike. Exercise has become a habit and a vital part of my day just like eating, sleeping and breathing.

The hardest part about exercise is getting off the couch, or getting out the front door, or away from what ever place you are drawn to by an invisible gravitational pull designed to stop you being fit and healthy. Once you’ve broken away from that place – the rest is easy…or relatively anyway!

So – how do we establish a routine that will eventually become a habit? Well, I have a number of suggestions which may help.

Remember, it takes 3-6 months of concerted, regular effort for something to become habitual, so don’t go expecting any quick fixes but with some application of effort and, dare I say it, discipline, exercise adherence is a real possibility and developing the skills to be self motivated are yours for the taking…we just need to get through that first few months…

1) Set goals.
Why do you want to get fit? Is it to lose weight, look good on the beach, drop a clothing size, be healthier? get stronger? What ever it is, write it down. Show it to people, tell people about you goal, explain what you are trying to achieve. The point of this exercise is to give you focus. Every workout missed or every day off your healthy eating plan puts you a day further away from achieving what you want from your time spent exercising. Make sure your goals are realistic and achievable in a reasonable time frame. If necessary break your main goal into “micro” goals that you can tick off on a regular basis, e.g.

Main goals
Micro goals
Lose 2 stone
Lose ½ pound a week
Run a marathon
Eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day

Exercise 5 times a week

Get 7-8 hours sleep a night

2) Write a pro and con decision list.
What have you got to gain versus what have you got to lose. If you ever feel your resolve waning, revisit this document and remind yourself what you have given up in return for all the benefits you are working towards, e.g.

Pros
Cons
Look better
Half an hour less sleep
Lose weight
Have to be organized
Feel fitter
Drink less alcohol
Have more energy
Eat plainer foods

After reviewing the above lists it should be apparent that the minor cons are outweighed by the greater pros and should serve as a reminder that the decision made is a worthwhile one.

3) Make a plan and stick to it.
Getting fit is a journey, and to successfully complete a journey you often need a map. By planning how to get from A to B, we can prepare for change and give ourselves a route to follow which will allow us to progress along our chosen path without having to worry about losing our way or getting distracted. Remember the old adage – “prior preparation prevents poor performance!” To help keep on the straight and narrow, consider the following points…


Plan your workout times – treat them as appointments and stick to them.
Have a back up plan in case you are unable to exercise at the time you wanted to – if you cant go to the gym, what can you do instead? If it’s raining, where else can you workout? Cover your bases! Have alternatives ready to cover as many eventualities as you can envisage.
Plan your weekly food intake and shop accordingly. One of the truths of diet and nutrition is that if you have junk food in your cupboard, you will eat it. As a result, make sure that you have plenty of healthy food in your cupboards and that includes snacks.
Make sure you carry adequate food and water with you so you don’t have to rely on grabbing a snack at work – prepare much of your days food the night before
Tell other people about your plans so they don’t accidentally interfere with your efforts to adopt a new healthy lifestyle.

4) Recruit a network of supporters.
Why suffer alone!?!? Ask friends, neighbors, family and friends to assist you in your goals. Seek out like minded people to act as training partners, get support from those closest to you, join one of the many web based groups that can offer both support and information to help you on your way. The main point is that you don’t have to “go it alone”. For some people this might mean hiring a personal trainer, or joining a group exercise class or it could just mean you work out with a neighbor. Whatever support method you choose, your efforts will be easier with someone else in your corner.

5) Keep accurate training and diet logs.
Write it down! Nothing motivates like success…but to judge success we need to see where we started. By keeping track of workout performance, dietary trends and physical measurements we can see when we improve. Sometimes we fail to see our improvements because they are, on a day to day basis, so small but overtime, these small improvements will add up to noticeable changes in body composition, bodyweight, fitness levels etc. Often, someone who hasn’t seen you for a while will comment on your dramatic weight loss or improved muscle tone – they haven’t seen you in a while so the changes seem great whereas to you, seeing yourself in the mirror on a daily basis may not have spotted much in the way of changes at all.

6) Don’t be afraid to fall off the wagon.
Even with the very best planning, goal setting and support network sometimes things just go wrong – life gets in the way. The key when this happens is to not let it phase you for too long and to pick up where you left off as soon as possible. These disruptions in routine are not failures, nor are they enough to undo all of your previous good works but unless you jump back on the wagon as soon as possible, they can be the start of the slippery slope back to our previous physical state and a lot of hard work wasted. Learn from whatever caused this disruption to your planned routine and take measures to try to minimize the chances of a similar disruptions happening again. Its kind of cheesy but some say that to FAIL is the First Action in Learning and so long as we take something positive away from a failure, then it was not a wasted opportunity.

7) Choose things you like.
By using the above 6 points, we can make exercise adherence much more likely, but if we choose activities we don’t enjoy or foods we don’t like, it becomes increasingly doubtful we will succeed in reaching our fitness or diet goals. There are many options for us to choose from and it is vital we chose things we are going to enjoy as much as possible. Why make things harder than they need to be? The old saying “it doesn’t have to be hell to be healthy” is a good one to adopt as a diet and exercise mantra. So…don’t like running? Try cycling. Not so keen on the gym? Join an exercise class. Don’t like fruit? Make fresh fruit smoothies or juices. There are many ways to skin the proverbial cat, so spread you net wide and select activities and foods that slot as seamlessly into your lifestyle as possible.

So, in conclusion: set goals, note down decision change pros and cons, make a plan and stick to it, recruit a support network, keep food and training diaries, don’t worry if you make mistakes (try, try and try again!), and choose foods and activities you enjoy. Following these simple guidelines won’t turn you into an exercise addict overnight but will help you to become a habitual, self motivated exerciser and lead you towards a long and productive health & fitness lifestyle.

Patrick Dale
http://www.solar-fitness.com/