Walking For Fitness
Your Personal Exercise Program
"Physical activity must be considered a lifetime pursuit. The benefits of a sound exercise program are rapidly lost once that program is discontinued."
— Jack Wilmore, Ph.D. and David L. Costill, Ph.D.Brisk walking is undoubtedly the safest and most sensible type of exercise program you can design for yourself. One is never too old to start. I have seen people in their sixties and seventies work their way very successfully into walking for exercise, even though they had paid little attention to fitness exercise in their earlier lives. If you have been sedentary much of your life and want to improve your quality of life, I suggest getting a fitness evaluation and exercise stress test at a physical education or physiology department at a major university. These tests are also available through hospitals and sports medicine doctors, but the cost may be triple that of those offered in a university.
The main reason for a stress test is to uncover any silent coronary artery disease that may need addressing before you enter a world of unaccustomed exertion. Complete evaluation tests should include blood analysis for cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, blood pressure, a history of family and personal health, a stress-test electrocardiogram to determine your ideal level of exercise, a dietary evaluation and body composition analysis. All these tests, which are well supervised and safe, tell a health professional just how much exercise you can safely tolerate. They also provide enough information for either you or a professional to document your current fitness level and design a walking program best suited for your personal fitness improvement.
Attaining and Measuring Fitness
Most fitness experts say that a half hour of rhythmic nonstop exercise, performed at least three times a week, improves the heart and circulatory system and gets the heart pumping large quantities of blood so that large muscle groups can function at their optimum level. Your pulse rate is the best indicator of the effort you expend while exercising. As the intensity of exercise increases, your heart rate speeds up and your perceived effort follows. There are certain heart rate ranges that are considered the most beneficial if one is to get the best training effect. If the effort is too mild, the training effect might be quite minimal. If it is too intense, the heart rate approaches maximum effectiveness and the exercise must either slow down or cease. Overexertion may be dangerous for an untrained person. Some exercise trainers recommend that exercisers stop during and after workouts to count heartbeats by feeling the pulse, counting 10 beats and multiplying by 6 to get the rate per minute (bpm). This formula is only an approximation of the actual rate.
Pulse Rate Monitors
Some recently developed pulse rate monitors are very useful for providing an accurate assessment of your heart rate during exercise. These devices are not only great training devices but are also helpful for anyone with a heart problem who must carefully stay within a certain heartbeat range. The pulse rate monitors I have found to work best for serious racers and those exercisers who must be careful not to get overstressed because they are on a controlled, prescribed exercise program is made by Polar CIC, Inc. of Port Washington, New York. This company has several models, but the two most popular are the"Favor," which displays heart rate only, and the "Pacer," which can be set to personal target zone settings and has a beeping alarm that goes off when you go out of your desired range. For instance, if you want to stay within the range of 120 to 150 bpm, you could set the monitor to beep either below 120 or above 150. In this way you can either speed up or slow down if the device beeps. For many exercisers it is well worth the investment to have one of these monitors to keep track of your current conditioning and to measure your improvement. If you train consistently, you may experience a dramatic decrease in heart rate for a certain amount of work accomplished at a certain heart rate.
Get to know how your body operates under various levels of exertion so that you know whether your exercise is too intense or too mild to provide a training effect. As your condition improves, your basic range will remain the same it's just that your better-conditioned heart can do more work within the range.
The Best Time To Exercise
There is no single recommended best time to exercise because everyone's lifestyle is different. The best time for vigorous exercise is when you can fit it into your busy schedule. One bit of advice is not to do your brisk walking right after eating a large meal because the digestion process demands part of the blood supply that normally would go to the muscles. Nevertheless the muscles must still draw blood to function. This causes an uncomfortable bloated feeling as partially undigested food sits in the stomach. For this reason the timing of your meals should have a direct correlation with the timing of your exercise program. It may take as much as 4 hours for a large, heavy meal to pass through the stomach and upper intestines and a small one in 90 minutes to 2 hours. However, mild exercise, such as strolling slowly immediately after eating, is actually thought to aid digestion by increasing the speed of passage of food through the digestive tract.
Climatic conditions are also a factor. Midday in the summer in southern Arizona is definitely not the time to be outdoors, but it might be perfectly delightful in the winter. Under humid conditions, coupled with heat, early morning before breakfast is probably the best time to exercise. In northern climates, at certain times of the year, it may be too cold to exercise in the morning or evening, so the noon lunch hour may be the best choice. There are some good indoor exercise machines that you can use at home when the weather is unfavorable. Most experts on fitness and exercise agree that an excellent indoor exercise machine is the Nordic Track, which exercises the large leg muscles as well as the upper body.
All humans and animals have built in 24-hour rhythms called "circadian," meaning "daily." These rhythms vary according to a person's own physiological systems that control the body's internal activities and can determine the response to exercise at any time of day. This phenomenon explains why some people are "early birds" and others "night owls." Because most people know where their highs and low occur, some feel better exercising in the early morning while others prefer to exercise in the evening. The time of day when you feel most energetic will have an influence on your motivation to exercise.
If weight loss is in your plans, walking in the evening may be the best time. Because eating in the evening has been known to be associated with weight gain, some fitness authorities believe that exercise in the evening may counteract a tendency toward weight gain. Since the body's metabolic rate stays elevated after exercise and the rate is increased in proportion to the intensity of the exercise, a good brisk walk in the evening could be a very good weight loss technique. But remember that going to bed immediately after exercising is not conducive to falling asleep. Rather, eat your evening meal after exercising and allow a couple of hours to allow your body to settle down before going to bed.
Find a regimen that you like, and then decide that you are going to improve and maintain your fitness level. Perseverance is the key. You will find that the time and effort are well spent.
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