About Exercise

Exercising and Health for Better Living

Want to live a healthy lifestyle? Find exercise you enjoy, nobody likes a chore.

Today’s world is busy, and no matter how much time we have in the day we will never feel like we’re on top of all the errands we need to run and miscellaneous things we need to take care of. As such, in order to take care of your body, even though it’s important, working in time to exercise several times a week is often one of the first things cut in order to take care of unimportant busywork. The problem? You will make time for things you REALLY want to do, and find ways to avoid things you don’t. If you don’t genuinely enjoy an exercise routine, moments of low willpower will have you finding any excuse to get out of it.

Now, being aware of your tendency to self-sabotage (be honest with yourself, you didn’t get in this situation by having legendary willpower now, did you?) can help, but it’s better to cut all that anxiety out entirely. It’s easy, you need to find something you genuinely enjoy.

We here at About Exercise don’t know you or your preferences, so you will have to do some soul-searching and think about what motivates you. However we can prompt you to think outside the box a bit–there is a whole world of physical activity out there that isn’t grinding away at a routine in a gym. Even within the gym, there’s much more to do than follow a fitness routine to the letter trying to fight off boredom and exhaustion all at once.

Do you have a competitive streak? Join a local sports team that you enjoy. Like video games or maybe just don’t want the hassle of going somewhere to exercise? Consider the popular “Dance Dance Revolution” series or the hit “Wii Fit” to get in shape right at home in your living room. Maybe you just want something new and unusual to hold your interest, and could consider an “alternative” or “extreme” sport such as paintball or skateboarding. There are far more creative ideas too, but they rely on what motivates you. Come up with something that you’d be excited to do several times a week, and look forward to so you don’t try to weasel your way out of it.

If you do have something unorthodox, we have a general structure to help you make any activity into a “proper” and safe exercise, no matter what you do. Of course, these aren’t hard and fast rules, and you don’t have to jam things in just because we said so if you are otherwise safe.

1) Stretch and warm up. Take a few minutes to do some stretches and get your body moving. Yoga is popular and healthy because even just stretching gets your body in gear, and offers a surprising bulk of the good things exercise do even before you really exert yourself. Plus, it’s just plain safe. So before you get started, take several minutes to stretch and get your blood pumping.

2) The fun part! Do what you enjoy doing. To be beneficial, make sure you go on for at least 20-30 minutes. Of course, if you’re enjoying yourself, more is even better as long as you are not getting to a point where you are stressing your body and hurting yourself. Things that are aerobic will help you burn fat immediately, while strength training types of exercise will help you build muscle that will burn fat over time, even while resting. Make sure you get your heart pumping, if you don’t feel winded after doing it, you need to kick it up a notch or two!

3) Cool off. No matter what you do, take a couple of minutes to do a few more stretches and cool off. This will be a great help in preventing what you love doing from harming you!

If your goal is to burn fat, aerobic exercise is great. Any activity that is lower intensity but lasts a while (and leaves you breathing heavily frequently) is an aerobic exercise. After you use up carbohydrates in your blood from the day’s meal that is easy for your body to use, your body will start pulling out that fat you want to get rid of to burn off. Over time your stamina will increase and you will be able to do more intense things for longer before feeling fatigued. Since most fun activities tend to be aerobic, it is likely that your thing is mostly aerobic. Strength training is also important, as it builds muscle, and if you’re trying to lose weight, lean muscle mass burns calories even when you’re at rest, so for long-term health, even light strength training is a huge help. It’s harder to make it fun, but it will also help you get better at your new favorite activity, so even if you can’t go to the gym, a few pushups, situps, pullups, and other such things around the house or before/after your activity starts will help quite a bit.

We here at About Exercise strongly believe that being healthy is fun and feels good, and is something anyone can do without doing things they hate. Don’t feel like you need to get the latest weight loss fad and newest “exercise secret” in order to lose weight or feel good–almost nobody who is healthy and happy with their weight over a long period of time even bothers with those! People who have been thin a long time aren’t so because they followed some diet and are now forever thin, and people who get regular exercise do so because they enjoy it. If you want to be happy with your weight and your health, you need to figure out how you can genuinely enjoy a healthier lifestyle.

Want to lose weight? Throw out the scale and the diet plan. Really.

Are you one of the millions of people stuck in that endless “diet yo-yo” and continually gaining and losing weight? Or just trying to lose weight at all and continually frustrated? Join the club! However, here at About Exercise we want you to renounce your membership, and in order to do that you must cast away some of the sacred rituals and poisonous “common knowledge” about diet and exercise that are incorrect. The biggest two? The concept of a “diet”, and the obsession with regular weigh-ins. We’ll touch on both, but for today, we want to convince you to throw your bathroom scale out the window. Actually don’t, that’s rather dangerous, but you really shouldn’t give it so much attention.

Those of you trying to reach an ideal weight know of the solemn weigh-in routine. Step on the scale daily, read a number, have emotional reaction. More often than not, said reaction is frustration. Your diet and exercise regime has been hard work, and the results are slow in coming. Constant weigh-ins like this tend to be terrible for your self-esteem and motivation. Moreover, getting healthy is a life-long process. You need to learn how to eat properly, and incorporate routine into your life, and obsessing over short-term gains and losses is terrible at reinforcing that. Even worse? Weight really isn’t a great indicator of how healthy you are. Building muscle will make you look and feel better (and burn more fat) but the scale can’t tell between healthy, heavy, flattering muscle and unsightly and unhealthy excess body fat that is comparatively lighter.

If you’re caught in the endless diet loop, you need to address the root causes of what got you to where you are. Over the years, you have developed habits and formed ideas that have caused an imbalance between how much food you intake compared to your activity level. It’s also likely that the quality of what you’re eating is less than ideal. Most people have a terrible concept of what a proper serving size is, and eat too much fat and empty carbohydrates. You simply cannot expect to ever be able to remain at a healthy weight you’re happy with and carry on like you have been! Short-term diets aren’t how healthy people maintain their ideal weight, they do it by learning about proper nutrition and portion sizes, relative to their activity level, and training themselves to enjoy eating this way every day. The best part is that it’s not as hard to do this as it sounds!

The scale is just distracting. What will help you look and feel like you want to is changing your habits to eat properly and get exercise regularly in a way that you enjoy and can keep up. The focus should be finding a healthy lifestyle that makes you happy, and the constant depressing news from the scale brings you down and makes you feel like these efforts are wasted because there is no immediate effect. Exercising and proper eating, meanwhile, feels good and continues to reinforce that your new habits are good for you.

Since our bodies are complicated machines, using the numbers on the scale to quantify your efforts are a bad idea. Losing weight is more of a side-effect and motivation to do something more important: feeling healthier and happier about yourself. The perfect example of this is something I touched on earlier. Many people who are trying to lose weight balk at the idea of strength training, as they fear that it will make them “bulk up” and get even bigger and weigh more. Women sometimes fear that it’s not “feminine” and that they don’t want to look like a bodybuilder. This is a very bad attitude! For starters, bodybuilders don’t look that way on accident. Trust me, unless you want to look like that, it won’t happen. Second, muscle burns fat even at rest, so the more you have the more extra calories you can burn every day, which will help you lose weight much faster. However this may not translate to lower numbers on the scale. It’s very possible those numbers will stay the same, but you’ll drop several sizes. This is something to get excited about! Ruining that by getting upset about numbers is a waste of time and energy, and could very well be detrimental to your progress. So forget the scale, worry about your body composition, and looking and feeling good.

So do you really want to be healthy? Do you want to look good (even in that swimsuit!) and feel good? Forget the scale. While you’re at it, throw out the elaborate diet plans. Go find physical activity you love doing and doesn’t feel like a chore, and pick up some reading on proper nutrition and a cookbook or two full of delicious and healthy recipes. If you don’t know what to do with those recipes, learn! About Exercise has many resources and advice to help you do this, so check them out.

Don’t base your self-worth on numbers, base your self-worth on how you feel. It’s OK to want to improve where you are and how you look while feeling good about yourself because you are heading in the direction you want to go.