Exercise & Fitness

Let's just pause for a moment and revise the steps in developing your home fitness program. You've carefully thought about why you want to get fit. You've set yourself some goals that you know you can achieve with just a little bit of effort. You've written those goals down and developed a strategy for reaching those fitness goals. When you sat down to create your plan you took your work, leisure, and family commitments into account, and you found a minimum of 30 minutes a day in your busy schedule that you could devote exclusively to creating a lean, mean…

Fitness is having enough energy to perform daily tasks efficiently, and with enough reserve energy to enjoy leisure activities. Fitness is not merely a measure of muscle development or strength. It also implies the ability of the heart, lungs, and arteries to efficiently distribute oxygen-rich blood to working muscles and tissues. Aerobic exercise (which stimulates the respiratory and circulatory systems) improves the body's ratings in these areas, aerobics is important in sports training. Aerobic, such as brisk walking, jogging, cycling, or swimming, are the best types. Make it strong enough to cause heavy breathing or panting, but not gasping. If you…

Exercise can be divided into two broad categories: hard exercise and soft exercise. Most people think that exercise and fitness are all about the first category, hard exercise. Hard exercise is where you sweat and stress and strain your body in an attempt to encourage it to make adaptations that will end up giving you greater strength, endurance, or aerobic fitness and make your body leaner and your muscles tighter. This is fine as long as you do not overdo hard exercise and you listen to your body and exercise within your current fitness limits. You also need to balance…

Fitness is the ability to do exercise, recover from the stress and strain, and then come back and do more work. Increases in fitness depend on adequate recovery after every exercise session. The main recovery period is the two hours straight after exercise, and the second recovery period is the next 24 hours after an exercise session. If you exercise regularly but don't seem to get any fitter, or you feel tired after an exercise session, or you often get ill, then have a good think about how you finish up each exercise or sports session. If you just plonk…

Osteoporosis is a lifestyle disease of sedentary cultures — it is practically unknown in tribal societies where life-long physical activity is the norm. Osteoporosis is not arthritis. Arthritis is a degeneration of the cushioning cartilage in the joints. The synovium (a smooth lining cushioning every joint that excretes the lubricating synovial fluid) becomes inflamed and deteriorates, leading to pain and swelling. If the synovial fluid dries up then the bone ends grind together and wear away, or they overcompensate and build up spurs of bone poking into the joint. Calcium and phosphorus are the key elements in understanding osteoporosis. They…

The Golden Rules for Abdominal Exercises are: Isolate the abdominal muscles, and maximize their involvement. Minimize the involvement of other muscles, especially the hip flexors. Minimize the assistance of momentum. Have a specific abdominal exercise goal, such as endurance, strength, or range of movement, and exercise to achieve that specific goal. Don't compromise the hips, back, or neck by performing the exercises too fast, or holding a position for more than a second, or twisting the back when in a flexed or extended position under load. If you can perform more than 20 repetitions of a particular abdominal exercise, then…

The so-called benefits of exercise and sport included immunity to heart disease in particular and other illness in general, relief from stress, anxiety, and depression, improved work and sexual performance, a better night's sleep, a slimmer, younger, more attractive body and a longer lifespan. Tennis Pros: sociable inexpensive low injury risk Cons: low exercise value unless played at a high level because of all the stopping and starting inconvenient - depends on facilities and fellow players, and can be difficult to play out of season Tips: select a racket at a specialist shop; join a club with indoor facilities; get…

Exercise science has come a long way in the last 10 years, and we now recognize different types of exercise, and the fact that each will have a different impact on your health. Some of the continuous aerobic forms of exercise that primarily utilize oxygen and fuels such as body fats and body sugars to release energy to power movement are: low-intensity aerobic conditioning (such as walking) high intensity aerobic endurance (running) anaerobic threshold training (sprint/jog) There are also different types of high-intensity anaerobic exercise that primarily use the breakdown of body sugars without involving oxygen to release energy to…

Having a busy life can sometimes mean that your health falls by the wayside. However, living a healthy lifestyle can help you get so much more done in your life. If you keep yourself active on a regular basis, you will feel much more energized throughout the day. Here are just a few ways that you can fit exercise into a busy schedule. Try workouts that you can do at your workstation You will be surprised by the number of workouts that you can do at your workstation. Keeping dumbbells in your office will be a great way to sneak in…