Sustainable Fitness: A Gentle Introduction
The world of personal fitness all too often glorifies the benefits of a beasting in the gym, leg day symptoms, and the go hard or go home ethos… but, what if… fitness didn’t have to be all that gruelling at all?
What if fitness could be done in a much more gentle fashion while still receiving all the benefits that go with it? What if it could be something you actively look forward to, something in which you feel the immediate benefits rather than stumbling out of the door? What if exercise could be performed within your comfort zone and you still move forward toward a fitter, healthier, more mobile, and more active version of yourself?
For most people it is this approach that will help them develop a love of, and a healthy relationship with exercise, finally instilling exercise as part of their daily lives and routine.
Now, I am not saying there is no place for more intense exercise, or that pushing yourself more than you are used to is not going to present some magnificent changes to your life, but starting this way, or pushing too hard too often is going to end up in slower progress in the long run!
Maybe try walking before you can run… If you did try walking before you could run, tried building consistency with exercise before building intensity, and focussed on the evolution of yourself rather than revolution, what benefits could you realistically expect?
Cardiovascular health
Cardiovascular health is all important when it comes to putting years on your life, and more importantly, life in your years. Resting heart rate, and recovery of resting heart rate, alongside improved heart rate variability, are all indicators of improved cardiovascular health, all of which are impacted positively through aerobic training.
The good news. Aerobic training has zero requirements for intense exercise. Simply choose an exercise that you enjoy: step class, walking, cycling, Zumba, weight training, or a varied selection and do at least 3×40 min blocks per week that fall
within the parameters below:
A steady heart rate of 65 – 85% of max (a basic HR monitor will help you with this).
A level of exercise you can maintain for longer than 30 minutes without undue fatigue.
A rate of perceived exertion of 7-8 out of 10.
An intensity at which you can maintain a conversation despite an elevated breathing rate.
As you improve over time you will find yourself doing a little more month-by-month to achieve the above, but if you stick to the simple guidelines and focus on getting slightly hot sweaty and out of breath three times a week you are onto a winner.
Joint health and flexibility
If you want to live longer and enjoy your life, joint health and flexibility are essential in the long term – your ability to get up and down off the floor and walking speed have been shown to have a huge correlation on your quality and quantity of life.
Higher repetition work through greater ranges or walking will often have far more positive impacts on joint health, range, and mobility than hard-hitting workouts, intense weight training regimes or running. Activities like yoga, or pilates are great to help with this but walking can be equally as beneficial as well as helping many people achieve a CV response at the same time. By walking at a challenging pace (and maintaining that pace as we fatigue) we
increase our stride length; strengthening the feet and calves while improving flexibility around the hips, feet, and ankles, and stability around the ankles and knees. We stand taller improving our postural strength and breathing mechanics.
All too often the benefits of walking are undervalued when put up against running but particularly if you are just starting you would be surprised how much more you get out of it than you will from running which will take its toll on your joint health.
Progressive weight management
Many people start an exercise regime in the hope that it will have a positive impact on their weight. However, very little is written on the powerful impact longer bouts of intense and strenuous exercise can have on ‘increasing’ our appetites – making it more difficult for us to manage our weight if we do not consciously monitor our food intake.
Through the implementation of reduced-intensity workouts, particularly when starting on your exercise journey and while developing an understanding of nutritional strategies that will help in the long term we can negate the increased appetites. By doing so we can increase the likelihood of adherence to an exercise program, whilst creating a small deficit and setting solid foundations for a long-term strategy and continued weight loss.
Reduced Stress
We do need stress to grow and develop. Stress is what helps us build resilience and evolve, but adding high-intensity, gut-busting workouts to an already overburdened stress system, without having the strategies to deal with it, is a ticking time bomb. Stress is indiscriminate, and all stress in our lives accumulates together in one great bucket, whether that is vocational, environmental, personal, familial, financial, or physical, adding more to a bucket that is already close to overflowing can be disastrous. Yes, exercise is stress! And intense exercise will pour more stress into the bucket than it lets out.
By starting with sensibly prescribed stress such as reduced intensity and somewhat ‘easy’ workouts we can empty the bucket a little without fear of pouring more water in the top whilst at the same time growing the bucket. We can focus on building consistency with exercise without the danger of injury, or inconsistency. We can reduce stress whilst building our capacity to deal with more.
Improved relationship with exercise
By exercising at lower intensities you lower the barrier to success, making it easier to create a habit of success. Rather than the feelings of exertion, and often failure that can be associated with exercise too intense in nature, you create positive feelings around your efforts, especially in the early stages of your exercise journey; you build an affinity for it, and your success comes from your consistency, rather than set goals, you desire to do more and it becomes an exponential skill.
You remove the fear associated with exercise, you exercise again because you enjoyed it, you get fitter because you do it more, you do more because you are getting fitter… and on… Ultimately, all exercise programs and personal health programs that focus on your relationship with yourself, with food, and with exercise will be more successful in the long term.
Exercise does not need to be hard to be effective, it merely needs to be ‘hard enough’ to elicit a response and in most cases, this is far less intense than you would imagine, despite what the gurus on social media platforms might be telling you. Focus on embracing the joy of movement, building confidence in your chosen methodology, getting used to how it feels to be out of breath and get a sweat on and building the foundations of a relationship with exercise that will last a lifetime.