Thirty days, which can affect your
whole life. Sounds like an exaggeration? Well, it's not! The first 30 days of exercise are
the hardest. That's when it is easiest to quit, or find excuses that you have to do
something else instead. But don't do it! Be stubborn. Do your three exercise sessions
every week, and you'll never regret it.
It will have a great effect on your health. Exercise improves your heart's capacity,
making it pump more blood, more efficiently, and without having to work so hard. Even when
you are not exercising, your heart will beat slower. Regular exercise will also strengthen
your muscles and joints.
Once your exercise program has become a routine, you won't even consider quitting. Think
of this. A week has 336 half-hours. Devoting three of them to your body is a cheap form of
life insurance. Here is an exercise program that you can use to get into shape:
Go through this routine three times, with a three-minute rest between each round. Choose a
level of resistance that you can manage.
• Pedal at 20 km/hr. for 1.5 minutes.
• Pedal at 30 km/hr. for 2 minutes.
• Pedal at 35 km/hr. for 1 minute.
• Pedal at 20 km/hr. for 1 minute.
The entire program:
• 5.5 minutes of bicycling
• 3 minutes of rest
• 5.5 minutes of bicycling
• 3 minutes of rest
• 5.5 minutes of bicycling
If you have not exercised for a while, you may feel that 35 km/hr. is too fast a speed.
Try it at 30 km/hr. during the first few sessions.
Begin every exercise session with a warm up. It is like starting up the body, and its goal
is to ensure that exercising is pleasant and safe. A warm up is done at low effort -
suitable forms of warm up exercise include walking, jogging and training on an exercise
cycle, stepper, crosstrainer or rowing machine. A warm up should get you lightly sweating,
and it should last for about 10 minutes, but you should never feel tired after this. To
conclude the warm up, stretch the muscles that you will use in the workout. Stretches are
fairly short, about 5-10 seconds each.
As a result of a correct warm-up, your suppleness improves, muscle and aerobic power
increases, the risk of injury decreases – and your desire to exercise will increase!
Always end with a cool down. It is just as important as a warm up. The purpose of a
cool down is to return the body and mind to rest, as well as advance the body's recovery
from the strain of exercise. You can do the cool down by gradually lightening your
exercise.
Finally, carefully stretch the muscles used in the exercise to their length at rest. The
cool down stretches last clearly longer than warm up stretches, for about 20-30 seconds.
Don't forget to drink enough fluids after the workout.
Remember always do stretching exercises after you have finished a session. Never exercise
right after a meal, or when you have a cold or other infection in your body.
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