Today we are talking about part 3 of our how to get fitter, more energised and more confident at home and at work.
Just to recap from last week, we talked about setting time aside to start achieving your goals. Hopefully you have done your homework and you now have your schedule in front of you so that you can see what time you have free to start achieving your goals. If you haven’t done the homework make sure you have do that before trying to do this week’s task.
Now that you have your time set aside hopefully you have a few hours at least to start achieving your health, fitness and weight loss goals.
This week we are going to find out what would be the best exercises and activities to achieve your goals. We are going to focus mostly on exercise because we want you to get fitter and more energised and also the exercise will help you feel more confident in yourself. So we are going to look at what would be most effective for achieving your goals.
Take for example first of all trying to lose weight, as a lot of you probably are, so a great exercise for trying to help you lose weight is running. A lot of people will start running because it is something easy they can do at home or from work. You don’t need any equipment, you just need a good pair of trainers, a good sports bra and off you go. So it is a great exercise, it’s a great calorie burner, it’s fun (well some people say that it is fun) it’s very rewarding because you can see progress quite quickly. But it is very hard to get going and it requires a lot of motivation as well.
Some people are put off running because they don’t like doing it in public or because they have sore knees or hip problems and because of the high impact nature of running it is not suitable for them. So running is good for people who don’t have knee problems or joint or bone problems and actually would like to be out in the fresh air and are quite happy motivating themselves to go out running.
For those who don’t like running there are alternative exercises of course. Something you might want to try is mini trampoline exercise or rebounding that we use in our studio in Loughborough. Mini trampoline exercise is low impact, so it wont damage the bones or joints. It is a really great calorie burner as well because you are working against gravity when you are on the trampoline so you are burning more calories because you weigh more when you are on the trampoline and have a heavier body mass so then it is going to help you achieve your weight loss goals really quickly.
Alternative exercises, cycling, swimming and not forgetting resistance exercise using the right amount of weight and doing the right amount of repetitions (low weight & high repetitions) will build up your endurance and build lean tissue rather than getting really bulky and muscly.
If your goal is toning you can do the resistance exercise I was talking about, join a circuit class perhaps, or you could do body combat at the gym, that is a very good fitness class because it’s very high tempo but it may not be suitable for absolute beginners as you may want something a little lower tempo to start off with.
We do a lot of resistance exercises in our studio using various different equipment, but you don’t really need any equipment to start off because your body weight would be enough to challenge your muscles and help you tone up.
If your goal is to increase your fitness as we have talked about you can do a combination of the cardio exercises – running, mini trampoline exercises, swimming, cycling etc – and also the resistance exercises.
If your goal is to get better at running you do need to do a certain amount of running to get fitter so that you can run a race, but you can also combine this with other exercises that gets your heart rate up. You will still build up your fitness.
Hopefully, I’ve helped you to think of some exercises you can do to start getting you fitter and more energised so that you can feel more confident at home and at work.
You can start to have a look for opportunities around you, fitness classes, gym memberships or coming to our private personal training studio in Loughborough perhaps where you can start to do some of those exercises in the spare hours that you found in your schedule. This week’s homework is to start to fit some of them into your schedule.