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Of all
the ways to prevent ill health, exercise is one
of the most effective and important.
Guidelines for Personal Exercise Programs
MAKING A COMMITMENT
You have taken the important
first step on the path to physical fitness by
seeking information. The next step is to decide
that you are going to be physically fit. This
pamphlet is designed to help you reach that
decision and your goal.
The decision to carry out a
physical fitness program cannot be taken
lightly. It requires a lifelong commitment of
time and effort. Exercise must become one of
those things that you do without question, like
bathing and brushing your teeth. Unless you are
convinced of the benefits of fitness and the
risks of unfitness, you will not succeed.
Patience is essential. Don’t
try to do too much too soon and don’t quit
before you have a chance to experience the
rewards of improved fitness. You can’t regain in
a few days or weeks what you have lost in years
of sedentary living, but you can get it back if
your persevere. And the prize is worth the
price.
In the following pages you
will find the basic information you need to
begin and maintain a personal physical fitness
program. These guidelines are intended for the
average healthy adult. It tells you what your
goals should be and how often, how long and how
hard you must exercise to achieve them. It also
includes information that will make your
workouts easier, safer and more satisfying. The
rest is up to you.
CHECKING YOUR HEALTH
If you're under 35 and in
good health, you don't need to see a doctor
before beginning an exercise program. But if you
are over 35 and have been inactive for several
years, you should consult your physician, who
may or may not recommend a graded exercise test.
Other conditions that indicate a need for
medical clearance are:
- High blood pressure.
- Heart trouble.
- Family history of early stroke or heart
attack deaths.
- Frequent dizzy spells.
- Extreme breathlessness after mild
exertion.
- Arthritis or other bone problems.
- Severe muscular, ligament or tendon
problems.
- Other known or suspected disease.
Vigorous exercise involves
minimal health risks for persons in good health
or those following a doctor’s advice. Far
greater risks are presented by habitual
inactivity and obesity.
DEFINING FITNESS
Physical fitness is to the
human body what fine tuning is to an engine. It
enables us to perform up to our potential.
Fitness can be described as a condition that
helps us look, feel and do our best. More
specifically, it is:
“The ability to perform
daily tasks vigorously and alertly, with energy
left over for enjoying leisure- time activities
and meeting emergency demands. It is the ability
to endure, to bear up, to withstand stress, to
carry on in circumstances where an unfit person
could not continue, and is a major basis for
good health and well-being.”
Physical fitness involves
the performance of the heart and lungs, and the
muscles of the body. And, since what we do with
our bodies also affects what we can do with our
minds, fitness influences to some degree
qualities such as mental alertness and emotional
stability.
As you undertake your
fitness program, it’s important to remember that
fitness is an individual quality that varies
from person to person. It is influenced by age,
sex, heredity, personal habits, exercise and
eating practices. You can’t do anything about
the first three factors. However, it is within
your power to change and improve the others
where needed.
KNOWING THE BASICS
Physical fitness is most
easily understood by examining its components,
or “parts.” There is widespread agreement that
these four components are basic:
Cardiorespiratory
Endurance - the ability to deliver oxygen
and nutrients to tissues, and to remove wastes,
over sustained periods of time. Long runs and
swims are among the methods employed in
measuring this component.
Muscular Strength -
the ability of a muscle to exert force for a
brief period of time. Upper-body strength, for
example, can be measured by various
weight-lifting exercises.
Muscular Endurance -
the ability of a muscle, or a group of muscles,
to sustain repeated contractions or to continue
applying force against a fixed object. Pushups
are often used to test endurance of arm and
shoulder muscles.
Flexibility - the
ability to move joints and use muscles through
their full range of motion. The sit-and- reach
test is a good measure of flexibility of the
lower back and backs of the upper legs.
Body Composition is
often considered a component of fitness. It
refers to the makeup of the body in terms of
lean mass (muscle, bone, vital tissue and
organs) and fat mass. An optimal ratio of fat to
lean mass is an indication of fitness, and the
right types of exercises will help you decrease
body fat and increase or maintain muscle mass.
A WORKOUT SCHEDULE
How often, how long and how
hard you exercise, and what kinds of exercises
you do should be determined by what you are
trying to accomplish. Your goals, your present
fitness level, age, health, skills, interest and
convenience are among the factors you should
consider. For example, an athlete training for
high-level competition would follow a different
program than a person whose goals are good
health and the ability to meet work and
recreational needs.
Your exercise program should
include something from each of the four basic
fitness components described previously. Each
workout should begin with a warmup and end with
a cooldown. As a general rule, space your
workouts throughout the week and avoid
consecutive days of hard exercise.
Here are the amounts of
activity necessary for the average healthy
person to maintain a minimum level of overall
fitness. Included are some of the popular
exercises for each category.
WARMUP - 5-10 minutes
of exercise such as walking, slow jogging, knee
lifts, arm circles or trunk rotations. Low
intensity movements that simulate movements to
be used in the activity can also be included in
the warmup.
MUSCULAR STRENGTH - a
minimum of two 20-minute sessions per week that
include exercises for all the major muscle
groups. Lifting weights is the most effective
way to increase strength.
MUSCULAR ENDURANCE -
at least three 30-minute sessions each week that
include exercises such as calisthenics, pushups,
situps, pullups, and weight training for all the
major muscle groups.
CARDIORESPIRATORY
ENDURANCE - at least three 20-minute bouts
of continuous aerobic (activity requiring
oxygen) rhythmic exercise each week. Popular
aerobic conditioning activities include brisk
walking, jogging, swimming, cycling,
rope-jumping, rowing, cross-country skiing, and
some continuous action games like racquetball
and handball.
FLEXIBILITY - 10-12
minutes of daily stretching exercises performed
slowly, without a bouncing motion. This can be
included after a warmup or during a cooldown.
COOL DOWN - a minimum
of 5-10 minutes of slow walking, low-level
exercise, combined with stretching.
A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE
The keys to selecting the
right kinds of exercises for developing and
maintaining each of the basic components of
fitness are found in these principles:
SPECIFICITY - pick
the right kind of activities to affect each
component. Strength training results in specific
strength changes. Also, train for the specific
activity you’re interested in. For example,
optimal swimming performance is best achieved
when the muscles involved in swimming are
trained for the movements required. It does not
necessarily follow that a good runner is a good
swimmer.
OVERLOAD - work hard
enough, at levels that are vigorous and long
enough to overload your body above its resting
level, to bring about improvement.
REGULARITY - you
can’t hoard physical fitness. At least three
balanced workouts a week are necessary to
maintain a desirable level of fitness.
PROGRESSION -
increase the intensity, frequency and/or
duration of activity over periods of time in
order to improve.
Some activities can be used
to fulfill more than one of your basic exercise
requirements. For example, in addition to
increasing cardiorespiratory endurance, running
builds muscular endurance in the legs, and
swimming develops the arm, shoulder and chest
muscles. If you select the proper activities, it
is possible to fit parts of your muscular
endurance workout into your cardiorespiratory
workout and save time.
MEASURING YOUR HEART RATE
Heart rate is widely
accepted as a good method for measuring
intensity during running, swimming, cycling, and
other aerobic activities. Exercise that doesn’t
raise your heart rate to a certain level and
keep it there for 20 minutes won’t contribute
significantly to cardiovascular fitness.
The heart rate you should
maintain is called your target heart rate. There
are several ways of arriving at this figure. One
of the simplest is: maximum heart rate (220 -
age) x 70%. Thus, the target heart rate for a 40
year-old would be 126.
Some methods for figuring
the target rate take individual differences into
consideration. Here is one of them:
- Subtract age from 220 to find maximum
heart rate.
- Subtract resting heart rate (see below)
from maximum heart rate to determine heart
rate reserve.
- Take 70% of heart rate reserve to
determine heart rate raise.
- Add heart rate raise to resting heart
rate to find target rate.
Resting heart rate should be
determined by taking your pulse after sitting
quietly for five minutes. When checking heart
rate during a workout, take your pulse within
five seconds after interrupting exercise because
it starts to go down once you stop moving. Count
pulse for 10 seconds and multiply by six to get
the per-minute rate.
CONTROLLING YOUR WEIGHT
The key to weight control is
keeping energy intake (food) and energy output
(physical activity) in balance. When you consume
only as many calories as your body needs, your
weight will usually remain constant. If you take
in more calories than your body needs, you will
put on excess fat. If you expend more energy
than you take in you will burn excess fat.
Exercise plays an important
role in weight control by increasing energy
output, calling on stored calories for extra
fuel. Recent studies show that not only does
exercise increase metabolism during a workout,
but it causes your metabolism to stay increased
for a period of time after exercising, allowing
you to burn more calories.
How much exercise is needed
to make a difference in your weight depends on
the amount and type of activity, and on how much
you eat. Aerobic exercise burns body fat. A
medium-sized adult would have to walk more than
30 miles to burn up 3,500 calories, the
equivalent of one pound of fat. Although that
may seem like a lot, you don’t have to walk the
30 miles all at once. Walking a mile a day for
30 days will achieve the same result, providing
you don’t increase your food intake to negate
the effects of walking.
If you consume 100 calories
a day more than your body needs, you will gain
approximately 10 pounds in a year. You could
take that weight off, or keep it off, by doing
30 minutes of moderate exercise daily. The
combination of exercise and diet offers the most
flexible and effective approach to weight
control.
Since muscle tissue weighs
more than fat tissue, and exercise develops
muscle to a certain degree, your bathroom scale
won’t necessarily tell you whether or not you
are “fat.” Well-muscled individuals, with
relatively little body fat, invariably are
“overweight” according to standard weight
charts. If you are doing a regular program of
strength training, your muscles will increase in
weight, and possibly your overall weight will
increase. Body composition is a better indicator
of your condition than body weight.
Lack of physical activity
causes muscles to get soft, and if food intake
is not decreased, added body weight is almost
always fat. Once-active people, who continue to
eat as they always have after settling into
sedentary lifestyles, tend to suffer from
“creeping obesity.”
WHEN TO EXERCISE
The hour just before the
evening meal is a popular time for exercise. The
late afternoon workout provides a welcome change
of pace at the end of the work day and helps
dissolve the day’s worries and tensions.
Another popular time to work
out is early morning, before the work day
begins. Advocates of the early start say it
makes them more alert and energetic on the job.
Among the factors you should
consider in developing your workout schedule are
personal preference, job and family
responsibilities, availability of exercise
facilities and weather. It’s important to
schedule your workouts for a time when there is
little chance that you will have to cancel or
interrupt them because of other demands on your
time.
You should not
exercise strenuously during extremely hot, humid
weather or within two hours after eating. Heat
and/or digestion both make heavy demands on the
circulatory system, and in combination with
exercise can be an overtaxing double load.
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