New 30 Day Exercise Challenge
The benefit of exercising every day in some form or fashion is that you’re essentially saying:
Having a healthy and fit body is not optional.
You’re making a concious decision to make exercise a daily part of your life. You’re saying that exercise is as vital to the body as food, air, or water. If don’t eat or drink, eventually I’ll die. You’re raising exercise to that level of importance.
The mistake that most people make when they begin an exercise program is that they try to do too much. They’ll go all out, hit the gym, work really hard… for about a week. Perhaps two. They begin they’re exercise program too quickly and usually burn out.
I’m approaching things differently. The idea is to make consistency your goal. You’re trying to develop a lifetime habit. You’ve decided that you want to exercise and be healthy 365 days a year. (Or as close to it as possible…).
Is it possible to do 2 hours of weight training 7 days a week, 365 days a year?
Of course not. You’d burn out and you’d hurt yourself.
So what’s the happy medium? How do you exercise daily and not burn out or hurt yourself? The way I figure it, a healthy exercise routine needs to meet the following criteria:
- It should have enough variety so that you don’t get bored
- It should be challenging (again so that you don’t get bored).
- It should develop both your strength and your cardio fitness.
- It should be flexible enough so you can exercise in some form or fashion everyday.
- It should have built in “down time” for each body part.
- It shouldn’t be too complicated.
- There should be lots of ways for you to succeed.
When I started my first 30 Day Exercise Challenge, I made it really easy for myself to succeed. Basically, if I did one of the things on my list of exercises each day I considered that a success. Some days I did more, some days I did just the one exercise. I did this for 60 days. What I found towards the end of the challenge was that apathy began to set in. I did alot of the minimum number of push-ups, those last couple of weeks… simply because it was easier. The challenge had grown a bit stale. Come to think of it, the daily things began to be abit blah soon after I finished my 7 Day Bikram Yoga Challenge. (There’s probably something to that…).
So, how do you make it more challenging without getting too rigid? (With the last challenge, if I had a really busy day, or was out of town with no access to anything but my own body weight, I could always walk, or do push-ups, or crunches.)
I think the answer is to increase the minimum amount of daily time I’ll spend exercising to 20 minutes a day. This will force me to choose more of the exercises off of my list to fill the time. I’ll also give myself the “out” of allowing myself to choose walking one of my routes as an accepted exercise for the day.
The rules:
For the next 30 days, I will do:
A minimum of 20 minutes of exercise
or
Walk one of my walking routes
I’ll check in 30 days from now.
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New 30 Day Exercise Challenge
Start date: Friday, 7/21/06
Next check-in date: Saturday, 8/19/06