Last week, I asked and you answered. One of the things you wanted to know about was how to build your own exercise program. An exercise program needs to consist of three basic elements: cardiovascular exercise, strength training and flexibility. These are the three tiers of fitness that you want to address.
Cardiovascular Training
Cardiovascular training refers to building fitter heart and lungs. Exercises you might do to increase your cardiovascular fitness include: walking, running, bicycling, roller blading, jump roping and more. Essentially, you want to hit your target heart rate and maintain it for at least 15 to 20 minutes per exercise session. Regular cardiovascular sessions of 30 minutes can burn as much as 250 calories each time you do it and burn an addition 100 to 150 calories in the hours after your exercise.
Training in cardio can also help you to lose weight, reduce stress and build your endurance. The great thing about cardio workouts is you can do them every day. So if you are ramping up a fitness program, you can do your cardio workout 6 days a week. Some people say you can do it 7 days a week, but I firmly believe you need at least 1 down day to relax on.
Strength Training
We’ve talked a lot about strength training in this blog. Strength training helps you to build and maintain muscle tone as well as mass. When we talk about strength training, we’re not talking about building yourself up into an Arnold Schwarzenegger body builder. We’re talking about developing what you already have and toning it. A toned set of arms, for example, will not have love handles hanging down.
Strength training is also good for weight loss because muscles burn more calories than fat. For every pound of muscle you add, you’ll be burning an extra 50 to 100 calories per workout, so that’s really a good trade off.
Flexibility
Flexibility is an area that some people often ignore. They think just stretching out is enough. But if you train in your flexibility you can actually reduce your chances for injury while at the same time increasing your range of motion. Flexibility training can also be done in conjunction with your other workouts. In other words, you can do cardio every day, strength training every other day and alternate the off strength training days with flexibility.
If you build a program with all three components, you’ll be in great shape in no time at all. Over the next few days, we’re going to build our own exercise programs whether you’re the busy mom with five kids and always on the go or you’re the business woman with one child or the swinging single with no kids. We’re going to cover it all.
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