The Retired Renegade

You aspire to become more active?

Today very few people are not aware that being physically active is good, its good for your mental and physical health. On the physical side doing regular physical activities, will in effect bring an important reduction in the risque of developing cardiovascular problems, certain cancers, diabetes type 2, hypertension, osteoporosis, and sometimes it even slows down the aging process.

On the psychological side, benefits are also important it will have an impact on your: mood, your concentration you’ll sleep better, it will reduce mental fatigue, anxiety, and your stress level. Are you taking advantage of these benefits? In other words are you a physically active or sedentary person.

Are your sedentary.

First let’s determine what being sedentary is. A person is considered sedentary when, day after day his or her activities are reduced to a minimum and the energy spent is close to rest, for example the regular daily activities are limited to watching TV, reading, working on a computer, driving a car or from time to time doing the groceries or going to the bank. Is this your situation? If you answered yes and you want to change read on.

Understand that the quantity of exercises needed to leave this sedentary life is not to do a marathon, far very far from it. All you need to do is enter the aerobic zone, even if go in on the tip of your toes… this zone includes all aerobic exercises, that will facilitate oxygen to flow freely in your active muscles. For this to happen the exercise must be demanding for the large inferior muscles (thighs, legs, buttocks) for a certain amount of time.

The key here is to exercise moderately. Moderate aerobic exercise increase your breathing, your pulse, and your body temperature, but you are still able to hold a conversation while working out. Its certainly not an exercise that will completely put you out of breath. A quick walk, swimming, social dancing, cycling, roller skating, are examples of good aerobic activities.

Its understood that when your exercising if your breathing gets heavy, your hearth beats faster your effort goes from moderate to high intensity, it may be your walking up a stiff hill, or involved in a hot tennis game. Be careful, try to keep it moderate. However, if you wish to grow the intensity of your training to this level, do it when your in good physical shape and with the approval of your doctor.

Getting in the aerobic zone

Here is a simple way to enter the zone. First avoid staying inactive for long periods of time, like watching TV for hours. Get up ounce in a while move around before getting back to the couch. Use the stairs when going up a few levels. When walking on the street or in a shopping center, walk faster up to 100 steps a minute. Walk at this speed for five(5) minutes in the beginning, than for ten(10) minutes and than fifteen(15). Do some of these activities for the next few weeks, and you will find that going from sedentary to being physically active is not so hard after all.

Eventually go for 30 minutes of fast walking per day or around 200 minutes a week. Its the minimum recommended by most health organizations. Its also understood that you can replace walking by any moderate aerobic exercise. You could also reach the 200 minutes in many different ways such as:

• 30 full minutes a day or 2 blocks of 15 minutes per day
• 5 times 40 minutes per week or 2 blocs of 20 minutes per day per week
• 4 times 50 minutes per week or 2 blocs of 25 minute a day 4 times

Finally if you are a very active person and everything is going well, what is there to say but keep up the good work.