Real Life Wellness: How are your Exercise Habits?
According to a Gallup poll, just less than half of the adults in the US exercised for 30 minutes at least one time within the last week. Certain people struggle much more to get exercise than others. People who have lower incomes and seniors tend to struggle the most.
Why? We all know the benefits of exercise. No one has to explain how important it is to your future health and well-being. This is why your healthcare provider looks at your current situation. They should walk all the way around the reasons you aren’t currently exercising and come up with solutions.
The first thing you have to do is get rid of every idea of what exercise is and start fresh in your mind. Exercise doesn’t have to be hours on a treadmill or lifting heavy weights next to a big burly guy in a cut off t-shirt. Fitness has dramatically changed over the last 10 to 20 years and there are more fitness alternatives today than ever before.
Once you rid yourself of what you currently consider exercise, then you can build a fitness plan into your new healthy lifestyle. But you need to understand why all of your attempts at fitness have not worked for you in the past. Then you can build an exercise routine based on whom you are and where you are right now in your life.
So why haven’t you made fitness part of your life already?
If you are like most people, the four biggest reasons you haven’t included fitness in your life are time, complexity, results and pain. All four of these reasons are valid and can lead to not exercising until you begin to look at the new science of fitness.
We have all been told the only way to get and stay fit is to work out 3 to 6 times per week. We are told to spend at least 45 minutes to an hour in the gym. Then, after you have gotten all sweaty, you have to get back into your day that is already overfilled with family, business and social activities. Is it any wonder you haven’t done this?
Time has always been the biggest obstacle for most people. But the latest research has blown up this old thought process and has proven you can work out many fewer times and using much less time than originally thought and still remain fit.
In the new book, 2 Days to Fitness by Rick Bramos A.C.E. and Ron Grisanti D.C., M.S., they provide a compelling case for adding fitness to anyone’s life no matter what age, sex, and body type or current fitness level. They document thousands of success stories of people just exercising just 30 minutes per day, 2 days per week and getting the results they have been trying to get their whole life.
The key to their system is to use 3 different types of exercises in combination with each other. They call it their 3-Cycle Training technique. It includes a warm up cycle, a muscle building and toning cycle and a fat burning cycle.
One long standing fitness myth you need to get over is aerobic exercise burns fat and will make you fit over time. The truth is aerobic exercise does not lead to long-term fat loss because long duration, low intensity exercise is easily adapted to and actually leads to fat storage rather than fat burning. Your body stores fat in anticipation for the next long duration exercise, so it never goes into the fat burning mode.
On the other hand, if you do short duration, high intensity exercises your ability to burn fat is increased dramatically and you continue to burn fat for hours after you are done. It is simply not about the number of calories you burn. It is all about the amount of fat you can mobilize and burn over the recovery period after you do the exercise.
We’ll talk more next week.