Fitness; Treatment

NWHRC Health Center - Fitness, Oct 9, 2007

The first and easiest change to make on your journey to fitness is to add "lifestyle physical activity" to your day. This means being more physically active during your usual daily activities. You can:

park in a far-away spot and briskly walk to your destination

take the stairs instead of an elevator

rake leaves instead of using the blower

play tag with the kids instead of computer games

go golfing, bowling or dancing for fun

walk down the hall instead of using the phone or E-mail

take a walk during a morning or afternoon break.

do indoor chores such as window washing, tub scrubbing or reorganizing your closet

do active outdoor chores, such as mowing the grass, gardening or washing the car

Making these changes is an easy way to improve mood and heart, respiratory, and muscular fitness, and to reduce body fat.

However, for women who need to make more dramatic gains in fitness or need to lose weight, a more formal exercise program, in addition to lifestyle physical activity, may be necessary. Your program should address the five components of fitness by including:

Aerobic activities, which involve using the large muscles of your body in a rhythmical, continuous activity, improving cardiovascular conditioning and helping reduce body fat. Aerobic exercises include walking, jogging, bicycling and swimming, and aerobics or other exercise classes or videos.

Strength training, such as weight lifting. This improves muscular strength and endurance and helps maintain bone density. It also raises metabolism, helping you burn more calories.

Stretching exercises, which include slow, gentle movements that elongate your muscles and improve flexibility. These are often part of exercise classes or videos, as well as yoga and Pilates.

How Much Is Enough?

One of the most common questions is, "How much do I need to exercise?" The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture and other professional groups recommend that healthy women do some sort of aerobic exercise on most or all days of the week for 30 to 60 minutes to reduce the risk of chronic disease. To manage body weight and prevent weight gain, women should exercise moderately to vigorously for 60 minutes most days of the week; 60 to 90 minutes most days to sustain weight loss.

These minutes can be accumulated in increments of 10. For instance, 10 minutes of an aerobics video in the morning, 10 minutes of brisk walking at lunch and 10 minutes of brisk walking in the evening. Intermittent exercise (intermittently increasing the heart rate) can be part of a good weight-loss strategy because your metabolism is elevated following each bout of exercise.

If you have been inactive, you need to work up slowly to this amount. Start with five or 10 minutes--whatever you're comfortable with--every other day and add one minute every other session. If you do too much too soon, you can become injured, fatigued and discouraged.

Similarly, don't overdo strength training. Start slowly, with lighter weights, and work up to heavier weights. You don't need to strength train more than three days per week, and 20- to 30-minute sessions are sufficient for most people. Finally, always wait at least 48 hours before exercising the same muscle group to give those muscles adequate time to recover between sessions.

Ideally, stretching and flexibility exercises should be done for 30 minutes three times a week, but even a mere five minutes at the end of an exercise session is better than nothing. They can follow an exercise session. Some lighter stretches can even be done at your desk or while you watch TV. Examples of stretching exercises include shoulder or arm circles. There are also a number of stretches specifically targeted to arm, back, chest, thigh and calf muscles.

How Hard Should You Work?

The second question is, "How hard do I need to exercise?"

As you work on increasing the length of your exercise sessions, you also need to work on increasing their intensity. Low-intensity aerobic exercise, like housework, gardening and walking the dog, provide many general health benefits, but to truly enhance fitness, especially if weight loss is one of your goals, you need to up the ante and exercise at a moderate or higher intensity with vigorous activities like brisk walking or jogging, singles tennis, aerobics classes or cycling.

In fact, results from a University of Pittsburgh study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women trying to lose weight can benefit as much from moderate-intensity physical activity as from an intense workout. The exercise duration and intensity trial involved 201 overweight, healthy women ages 21 to 45 years. All received reduced-calorie meals and were assigned to one of four physical activity regimens.

The regimens consisted of either a moderate or vigorous-intensity physical activity performed for either a shorter (2.5 to 3.5 hours per week) or longer (3.5 to 5 hours per week) duration. The physical activity consisted primarily of brisk walking that burned between 1,000 and 2,000 calories a week.