Best Training Tips for the health of your life
Your training goals
The goal is to devote two or three half-hour periods a week to training. The reason for this form of training is that walking and running are natural activities. With large muscle groups at work doing these actions, exertion is moderate and the training effect is still good. You are not dependent on others, as in team sports and you can always find some place to train, even white traveling in your own country or abroad. It does not matter if you training the morning, afternoon or evening.
Practical circumstances will decide your schedule. Your tempo should be adapted to your degree of fitness, health and age. It should not be extended beyond a certain level and speed should not be your objective.
The course illustrates a basic principles in all training, large muscle groups work at varying speeds. Other sports can be designed according to the same principle. Joint and muscle exercises can be done most simply at home, but for overall fitness, you need to get all your muscle groups working together.
Why speed is not important
At present, covering as long a distance as possible within 12 minutes is a popular training method. In my opinion, this is overdoing things, from a physiological point of view. As was pointed out earlier, it is not necessary to aim a maximal performance if the goal is to improve the function of the cardiovascular system and to bum extra calories. As far as health is concerned, it is not the absolute amount and volume of training that is important, but the work in relation to the individual’s capacity is what is critical. The severe, prolonged training of the top athlete adds no health benefits to those of a sub maximal training program twice a week. It would be a pity if point systems and stopwatches should become the be-all and end-all of regular physical activity.
How hard a pace should be sustained
As we mentioned previously, an effective training program should have large muscle groups working hard but not at a maximum for a few minutes. The reason why the pace should not be at certain pace (for example, seven miles per hour), the combustion engine, with its demand for oxygen transported by the blood, supplies the energy. When speed is further increased, the anaerobic motor has to satisfy the increased energy demands while the load on the heart is not further increased. The seven miles per hour speed provides full exercise for the heart and circulation while a still higher tempo develops the ability to utilize anaerobic processes and to tolerate lactic acid (the waste product of muscular activity). Training at maximum speed for a minute or so is very strenuous. It is an inevitable part of the athlete’s training program, but it is wise to exclude it from an average person’s training program. The conclusion is, thus, that a distance that can be covered in about three minutes can be run in three and one-half or even four minutes without being less effective in conditioning the cardiovascular function.
As a guide, I would say that if the heart rate rises to 200 minus your age in years (for example 165 for a 35 year old), a good training effect is being achieved.
Checking your heart rate
To determine if you are exercising at the correct intensity, stop your activity momentarily take your pulse for 10 seconds and then multiply that number of beats by 6. Check the chart following and see if your pulse rate falls within the target zone. In the beginning keep your pulse rate near the lower limit. As you become more fit, your target heart rate can approach the upper limit.
Within wide limits, when walking fast, jogging, or running, the speed is unimportant as a determinant of the energy cost per mile. The point is then to cover a certain distance. A 150- to 160-lb, person consumes about 50 calories by walking at three miles per hour and about 80 calories by walking at five miles per hour or running at any speed about half a mile. Taking walks, preferably a mile or so a day, will provide long term benefits. You could, for example get off the bus a few stops earlier and get on a few stops later. If it’s not too far, you can walk or cycle to work in good weather
Tips for women
As you begin your training program, you should ave no fear of becoming heavily, unattractively muscled. On the contrary, with disuse or little use, muscles tend to become less elastic, weaker, softer. They lose tone. The exercises you will be working with are designed to firm your muscles, restore their tone, increase their strength and flexibility. Your appearance will improve as certain muscles in the abdomen and back, for example become able to provide better support. As others, in the arms, legs become more responsive, every move you make is likely to be easier and more graceful.
Ergometry and the ergometer
The term ergometry stems from the greek ergon (work) and metron (measure) and it may be translated rather literally as “work measurement.” The instruments of work measurement are ergometers and they vary in their construction according to the form of analysis. Bicycling has proved to be a very suitable work form since, among other things at a given (sub-maximal) load, it demands about the same energy output whether the subject is young or old, trained or out of condition, elite cyclist or unfamiliar with the sport.
The bicycle ergometer was invented several decades ago and has been widely used. This instrument provides an exact measurement of the performed external work and thus a graded measureable load can be applied to the subject. The load is adjusted quite simply be varying the tension of belt running around the rim of the one wheel of the machine , acting as a mechanical brake, while the subject pedals at a constant speed in time with a metronome.
On a stationary bicycle ergometer a standard, sub maximal work load is applied for six minutes, the heart rate being counted during the last minutes of exercise and noted. In principle the lower the heart rate, the better is the pumping power of the heart rate, the better is the pumping power of the heart. The heart rate of an untrained subject may reach 170 beats per minute during the test. If he or she then starts to train a couple of times a week and after a month is tested again, the heart rate may be found to have fallen to 140 beats per minute, showing that the training has been effective.
This test has proved to be a valuable educational and psychological tool for stimulating people to start and to continue training. In Sweden, there are now about 6000 bicycle ergometers in use. They are available in every school and also in sports clubs, factories, and offices. Anyone who is interested can take the sub maximal test and follow his or her physical condition over the years.
Water activities
Swimming is one of the best physical activities for people of all ages and for many of the handicapped. With the body submerged in water, blood circulation automatically increases to some extent pressure of water on the body also helps promote deeper ventilation of the lungs and with well planned activity, both circulation and ventilation increase still more.
Weight training
Weight training also is an excellent method of developing muscular strength and endurance. Where equipment is available at most sporting goods stores. A good rule to follow in deciding the maximum weight you should lift is to select a weight you can lift six times without strain.
Sport
Soccer, basketball, handball, squash, ice hockey, and other sports that require sustained effort can be valuable aids to building endurance. But if you have been sedentary, it is important to pace yourself carefully in such sports, and it may even be advisable to avoid them until you are well along in your physical conditioning program. That doesn’t mean you should avoid all sports. Excellent sports in which exertion can be easily controlled and in which you can progress at your own rate are bicycling, hiking, skating, tennis, running. Cross-country skiing, rowing, canoeing, water skiing and skin diving. You can engage in these sports at any time in the program, if you start slowly. Games should be played with full speed and vigor only when your conditioning permits doing so without undue fatigue. For a view of sports by the experts, see the appendix.
Posture
There is a relationship between good posture and physical fitness one helps the other. Good posture acts to avoid cramping of internal organs, permis better circulation, prevents undue lengthening of others. It contributes to fitness.
For good posture, centers of gravity of many parts of the body feel, legs, hips, trunk, shoulder, and head must be in a vertical line. As viewed from the side when you ae standing, the line should run through ear lobe, tip of shoulder, middle of hips, just back of kneecap, just in front of outer ankle bone. Get the feel of proper posture positions. Practice them until they become habitual. Some
Strength training and isometric exercises
A distinction should be made between isometric or static and dynamic work. With static contraction of the muscles there is no movement in the joints in question but movement arises with dynamic work. There are in fact few exercises which are completely dynamic since a great many muscles always have to work statically to provide muscles working dynamically with good support and work conditions.
If you wish to improve your maximum strength, you must work against hard resistance. Endurance training, on the other hand, is best undertaken with lighter resistance and with many repetitions.
For general training of the muscles, work should be chosen against a load big enough to be managed just 5-10 times. You can use barbell weights, muscle developers or your own body weight as loads. Strong persons could for example do 5-10 push ups at a fast pace. Weaker persons could do the push ups with their hands on a sofa, table or wall instead of the floor. The position of the hands can be lowered as muscle strength increases.
You can strengthen your abdominal muscles by lying the floor on your back with knees bent and lifting your trunk with full sit ups. The movement is easier if the feet are supported. It should be done 4-16 times, possibly repeated after a pause.
The back muscles can be forced to work if you lie on your stomach and try to lift your legs and the upper part of your trunk off the floor. People with stiff backs should lie on a proper cushion placed on a level with the pelvis. The exercise is repeated.
Leg muscles are trained by walking up stairs, skipping rope and jumping or running in place. A good way to train is to climb up and down from a steady chair the classic (but somewhat boring) step test! Running 20-25 strides up a steep hill or up as many stairs, walking down and then running up again about 5 times is also effective training in this respect.
Muscular strength is dependent on both muscle mass and the function of the central nervous system. The repetition of a given movement will result in an improvement in that particularactivity, but will have much less effect on another movement even if it happens to be related. The transfer effect as it is called is fairly weak. Personality, I believe that dynamic exercises have a more all around effect than isometric training. Certainly trunk muscles work predominantly isometrically in many daily activities but they will become trained for these tasks, for in many of the activities that engage the arms and legs they work isometrically to stabilize the pelvis and trunk.
Cardiac patients should avoid isometric exercises and also heavy work involving small muscle groups (like push ups, chin ups). Such activities load the heart abnormally since the heart rate and arterial blood pressure become higher than in dynamic work with large muscles.
Smoking and its effects
Within a few minutes of smoking two cigarettes a persons breathing resistance increases to two or three times the normal value. He or she may not notice this increase at rest since relatively little air is required, but breathing may become the limiting factor during exercise with these increased demands on the respiratory system. The smoker is usually short of breath with a little exertion.
Smoking also affects the heart and blood circulation. Two cigarettes just before muscle work may, thus, raise a person’s heart rate to a level 20 to 30 beats above the normal. Both the carbon monoxide and nicotine in the smoke play important roles in triggering this increase in the heart rate. Carbon monoxide combines wih the haemoglobin in the red blood cells 250 times more readily than oxygen. A smoker may have about 5% or more of his or her blood cells blocked by carbon monoxide and the presence of this gas makes it more difficult for the red blood cells to yield oxygen to the tissues. Thus, the smoker’s heart has to pump more blood per unit of time in order to transport a given volume of oxygen and the load on the heart increases. Recent evidence has shown that nicotine levels in the blood are contributory factors in disease and arteriosclerosis and coronary disease.
Accordingly, smoking causes a decline in a person’s physical condition, the extent of which is determined by the number of cigarettes smoked. Cigarettes it should be mentioned have a greater unfavourable effect on the body than cigar or pipe smoking.
The instinct of self-preservation undoubtedly explains why athletes in endurance seldom or never smoke!