Your Personal Workout Schedule

Your Personal Workout Schedule
by Fitness Scientist

How often, how long and how hard you exercise and what kinds of exercises you do, should be determined by what you are trying to accomplish, not by what someone else is trying to accomplish.

Your fitness goals, present fitness level, age, health, skills, interest and convenience are among the factors you should consider.

For example, an athlete training for high-level competition would follow a program of higher-intensity than a person whose goals are good health and the ability to meet work and recreational needs.

Your exercise program should include something from each of the four basic fitness components. Each workout should begin with a warm-up and end with a cool-down.

Resistance type exercise programs should be performed with controlled speed of movements, using resistance that allows repetitions to be performed for about one minute or more.
As a rule, space your workouts throughout the week -- (up to 4 days rest is recommended) -- and avoid concurrent days of hard exercise.

Here are the amounts of activity needed for the average, healthy person to maintain a minimum level of overall fitness. Included is some of the popular exercises for each category.

1. Warm-up: Five minutes to 10 minutes of exercises such as walking, slow jogging, knee lifts, arm circles or trunk rotations. Low intensity movements that resemble the movements to be used in the activity can also be included in the warm-up.

2. Muscular Strength: Two sessions per week that include exercises for all the major muscle groups. High-Tech resistance training is the most effective way to increase total conditioning.
I mention High-Tech only in the way Nautilus and MedX equipment are High-Tech because:
the design of this equipment provides what is know as "variable resistance." This is a valuable design component, because as muscles contract and move throughout the range-of-motion, the resistance must also vary in accordance with the strength curve of the contracting muscles.

3. Muscular Endurance: No more than two sessions each week that include exercises such as walking (if one is deconditioned or injured) and progressive resistance training for the major muscle groups

4. Cardiorespiratory Endurance: Two 20 minute bouts of continuous aerobic (activity requiring oxygen) rhythmic exercise each week can produce excellent results.

5. Popular aerobic conditioning activities include brisk walking, jogging, swimming, cycling, rope jumping, rowing, cross-country skiing, and some continuous action games like racquetball and handball.

6. Fitness Therapy Exercise programs, using resistance can be most beneficial because they provide all of the needed fitness factors within one exercise program.

7. It is possible to produce aerobic improvement using resistance exercise. All you need to do is select exercises that are considered multi-joint exercises, perform each exercise using higher repetitions, say 15 to 20 reps, use controlled, continuous movements until muscle fatigue, and reduce your rest period.

8. All this advice takes into account that your are considered healthy and that you understand exercise basics.

9. Flexibility: Daily stretching exercises with or without added resistance. Actually all stretching is performed with the weight of the various body segments, therefore they truly resistance type exercises.

10. Performed slowly, without a bouncing motion, stretching exercises can be performed at any time and several times a day. One must hold the stretched position for about 20 seconds to be most beneficial.

11. Cool-down: A minimum of five minutes to 10 minutes of low-level movements combined with stretching. A properly structured resistance program can be effective as a cool-down.

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