If you are looking for a shortcut to achieve your goal, you are wasting your time.
Shortcuts don’t work most of the time. Especially if you are trying to achieve something worth while, something that’s somehow hard to achieve. This applies to to your health, loosing weight, becoming stronger, faster or fitter more than anything else.
Stamina is utterly important. And stamina is only possible if it’s managed well.
People think all they need to do is endure 3 or 5 more intense exercise sessions and their fitness dreams will come true.
They are stupidly wrong.
Being good at anything, getting in great shape or achieving anything is like windsurfing – the definition of being good at it is being able to make it look easy. But it never is easy. It takes lot’s of practice, lot’s of hours in always changing environment and dealing with it. That’s what people conveniently forget.
If I were just starting my quest for better shape, health, fitness, weight loss or anything, I wouldn’t try to do a lot in the gym for long time. I would try to do something far simpler.
I would find that extra half hour or 45 minutes every day, that belongs to nobody else but me, and I would make it exercise productive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough and magical, life transforming things happen eventually.
Sure, that means less surfing Internet, going out and hanging out in coffee shops, less time watching TV, saying no to other people more often or whatever.
Every workout, regardless of your time constraints, needs to be preceded by a warm-up session. If you don’t have time to warm up, than you don’t have time to work out.
Warm-up prepares the body for what it is about to come – more intensive activity.
Warm-up is an activity that raises the total body temperature, as well as the temperature of the muscles, to prepare the body for vigorous exercise. It is part of the foundation of successful exercise session. Getting fully warmed up, mentally and physically, is a key aspect of attaining a training intensity required to achieve great results.
Warm-up protects against injury by improving flexibility of the muscles.
Here are some of the benefits you achieve with warm up:
An increase in muscle blood flow
An increase in the sensitivity of nerve receptors
Faster moving oxygen from hemoglobin
An increase in the speed of nerve impulse transmissions
Warm up guidelines:
In general the warm-up activity should last approximately 5 – 15 minutes, long enough for you to break out in a sweat.
It needs to be done with gradual increase of intensity – from 40% to 60% of maximal intensity.
You should choose activity mechanically similar to the primary conditioning activity and intensity should be well below that of the primary activity.
Examples of warm up activities:
Stationary cycling – start with cycling against little or no resistance and gradually increase it
Sprinting – jogging and graduated pace in running intervals
Elliptical – Start with little resistance and gradually increase it
Lap swimming – begin with slow crawl and gradually increase arm stroke, do some more intensive short intervals 1 – 2 laps
Stationary exercise devices like rowing machine, stair masters, treadmills – begin with 40 – 60% of intended conditioning workload or speed and slowly increase
Weight training – gradually warm up with all body activities like rowing machines or elliptical; treadmill is fine, but take some light dumbbells and move your hands too
