Aerobic Exercises
Overall Health
The key to successful weight control and improved overall health is making physical activity a part of your daily routine. Any type of physical activity you choose to do–strenuous activities such as running or aerobic dancing or moderate-intensity activities such as walking or household work–will increase the number of calories your body uses. It’s easier than one thinks to perform numerous aerobic activities throughout the day.
- Examples of mild to moderate aerobic activities:
- Take a short walk around the block
- Rake leaves
- Play actively with the kids
- Walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator
- Mow the lawn
- Take an activity break–get up and stretch or walk around
- Park your car a little farther away from your destination
- Examples of higher intensity aerobic activities:
- Brisk walking
- Jogging
- Bicycling
- Swimming
- Aerobic dancing
- Racket sports
- Rowing
- Ice or roller-skating
- Cross-country or downhill skiing
- Using aerobic equipment (i.e., treadmill, stationary bike)
The Difference in Aerobic Activities
Aerobic activity is often coined either High Impact or Low Impact. The basic difference is that one foot always stays on the floor and supports the weight of the body in low-impact aerobics. High-impact aerobics include actions that take both feet off the floor, thus causing more jarring of the joints when the body weight hits the floor again. An example of Low Impact is walking while High Impact is jogging or jumping up and down.
The point is not to make physical activity an unwelcome chore, but to make the most of the opportunities you have to be active.
Starting Low
It is important to start at a low intensity and increase this over the following few weeks as the exercise feels easier. For example, 20 minutes of walking, jogging or a combination of walking/jogging may be sufficient to leave you rather breathless and fairly tired at the start of your program, but as the weeks go by, you may need to increase the pace or introduce jogging up some shallow hills to achieve a further increase in fitness. To continue to increase your fitness level, you will have to increase the time spent exercising aerobically to 30 minutes per session for up to five sessions per week.
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| Benifits of Aerobic Exercise Keeping the Beat in Aerobics Aerobics for the Heart Free Aerobic Activities |
Training for an activity can be empowering. Learning to do something new, training hard, and coming across the finish line or riding up that big hill can give us a wonderful sense of accomplishment. The process allows us to access places in ourselves that our normal day- to- day comfort zone usually doesn’t touch. Training can be humbling for nearly the same reasons – learning something new and training hard forces us to be beginners again, and as adults this can sometimes be a difficult place to be in.
I have a long outdoor stairway close to my house. I try to run up and down at least three times a week. It’s free and I free great after I am done.