The Joy of Exercise

Don’t work at exercise. Play with it. Work is something we all hope to someday retire from. Play is something that we hope will last forever.

You should never force yourself to exercise. Have fun. Just force yourself to get off the couch.

The 60 to 90 minutes of exercise that you will do each day need not be exhausting. Actually, exercise burns fat best when it is moderate; jogging for example, burns fat more efficiently than sprinting.

Exercise can be so mild that you may not even recognize it as exercise. For example, if you go for a pleasant walk, that’s exercise. If you play catch with your child, that’s exercise. The main thing is to get on your feet and start moving. Just don’t be sedentary. Turn off the TV. Get off the couch.

Ideally, though, your exercise programme should be centred around a 30- to 40-minute period of aerobic exercise, which should be strenuous enough to make you sweat. Even this relatively intense period of exercise, though, need not make you breathless. As you do your aerobics, you should be able to maintain a normal conversation.

To increase your fitness, your heart rate should increase by about 75-100 per cent over your resting heart rate. For most people, this will consist of about 115 to 135 beats per minute, depending upon age and fitness level.

If you exercise harder than this, your body will be more likely to burn stored blood sugar than fat. It is helpful, though, to occasionally do bursts of very strenuous activity to increase the strength of your heart, and muscles. But don’t overdo it. If you push yourself too hard, you’ll end up hating your exercise — just as you’ll end up hating your diet if you try to starve yourself. Be moderate. Achieve balance. Think about the long term, not the short term.

In addition to your centrepiece of aerobic exercise, you should also do about 15 minutes of stretching and about 15 minutes of strength training with weights.

Stretching is critical for maintaining flexibility, and flexibility seems to have an almost magical effect upon the body. It appears to help preserve optimum function of the circulatory system, nervous system, skeletal system, and muscles. In fact, one of the tenets of yoga is ‘You’re as young as your spine is flexible.’

I once saw a dramatic example of the youth-preserving effects of exercise in general, and flexibility in particular, in an elderly man who had a generally unhealthy lifestyle. He smoked, drank beer, and ate carelessly. But he had a three-acre mini-farm and did all the work on it himself, even in his seventies. He was extremely fit and healthy, and was so agile that every year, on his birthday, he performed an amazing feat of flexibility. He would hold a straight pole, such as a broomstick or yardstick, behind his back with both hands, and then jump over the stick, without letting go, so that it ended up in front of him. (Try this sometime. It’s practically impossible.) When he was 76, though, he slipped off a roof and shattered his heel. He stopped exercising and was dead in about 18 months.

Your stretching can consist of yoga or any simple exercise that gently stretches muscles, tendons, and ligaments. It’s wise to stretch just before you begin your aerobic exercise, to help avoid injury and muscle strain. You should also stretch just after exercising.

After you have eliminated reactive foods from your diet, you may find that you have much more flexibility, because your joints may become healthier. Many people overcome joint stiffness and arthritis-like symptoms on the False Fat Diet, since food reactions and general toxicity commonly cause stiffness in joints.

Besides stretching, you should also do about 10 to 15 minutes of weight work every day, or at least every other day. This is the best way to strengthen your muscles. Some people hate weight training, because it can be hard, especially if you try to lift as much as possible. This is not necessary, however. You can achieve a remarkable degree of muscle definition and strength by lifting very light weights. Many people only need to work out with a light set of 2-pound to 5-pound dumbbells. Of course, you’ll have to do a higher number of repetitions with light or moderate weights, but even a high number will be relatively easy. If you use light or moderate weights, you won’t experience the gut-wrenching ‘grunt and groan’ labour that’s often associated with weight training. Lifting light weights is so easy that most people enjoy it — especially when they see the fast and dramatic benefits it achieves.

As you integrate exercise into your lifestyle, don’t get hung up on how much you can lift or how far you can run. That’s the kind of self-critical, competitive attitude that will eventually doom your exercise programme. If you impose artificial expectations on yourself, you’ll eventually either fail or become resentful of your own self-imposed authority.

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Category: Bodybuilding, Diet, Exercise, Fitness, Workout

Tags: aerobic exercise, all, end up hating, Exercise, flexibility, food, life, lifestyle, minutes, moderate, muscles, people, stretching, though, weights, work, yourself