Exercise
Athletes, part time or full time, are usually going to get a good workout every week, if not 5 days a week.
Depending on where you come into this program you may have some health issues or limitations to deal with in getting your exercise in. Talk to your doctors, be careful how hard you push yourself. You can get tools that can help you keep an eye on heart rate. Tools like Heart Rate monitors are powerful tools even at advanced levels, but if you have health conditions, the stakes are to high not to take some precautions. Your doctor should be able to provide you with the details on the limits you should adhere to.
If that isn’t an issue - get to work!
No matter what gym I go into it is easy to see a very wide variety of workout intensities. People that work hard and commit to what ever work out they are part of make great gains. People that pace themselves and pick and choose what parts to even work on will never reach their potential. Seems obvious doesn’t it, but people fall victim to it all of the time.
You don’t have to push yourself to the limits everything to workout, but if you are going to count it as a workout get busy. Nothing of value comes without work. In time that work is a lot of fun as well.
Your body being the amazing machine it is, is not hard wired to work one way for ever. Given the correct stimuli, fuels and motivation your body adapts. In regards to getting exercise, your body measures the exercise you get on a regular basis. Based on that it determines the amount of fuel you will be needing in the next day or so and then send the rest to storage - FAT.
As you develop the habit of exercising 4 + days a week with at least 45 minutes each session, your body starts saving the fuel you eat so it will be accessible quickly. Everything else is sent to storage. As you begin your next workout the fuel in your muscles is used first and builds the fire up so you can start burning of the fat when you need them. This makes getting to the point where your body is burning fat much easier and faster.
Workouts
The type of workouts you do is a personal choice. Some maybe better than others at building muscle mass, or cardio, general conditioning or what have you. Few things to consider first and foremost -
- Pick something that you have fun with
- Mix things up
- Really look at what your goals are and talk to people at that level and find out how they got there
There are 2 basic kinds of workouts
Cardio
Cardio workouts should be at least part of everyone’s over all regimen. You will find a lot of the calories burned during these activities. The end goal of cardio training is to increase your ability to work out. Someone that is out of shape will get their heart rate up very high but maintain that for next to no time and will take a long time before they can catch their breath again. A well trained athlete can go at a high pace while pushing harder for short times through a long workout. They will also recover a resting heart rate quickly.
Knowing your heart rate, even at a very basic level is important. Read up on this more here (link coming soon).
Strength Training
What we are looking for here is lean muscle mass. If you want the big bulky muscles, well more power to you, but that is not a health asset. Lean muscle is needed for a healthy body. Lean muscle protects your joints, it burns the fuel we eat, allows for better cardio, etc.
Best of Both Worlds
There many workouts available to you that either specialize in on workout type or another or in some combination. Look to your goals and work backwards from there. This way you will focus on the workouts that build the foundation for your goals.
If you are looking at a sport, oh lets say BJJ, you will find it incorporates both, but people that take the sport seriously will add focused cardio and strength training to complement and improve their BJJ.
You will find many options to workouts that combine strength and cardio - like circuit training with a personal trainer. These are great, but if you are motivated and or have a friend to workout with you can come up with many, many options.
For me - Body weight training is my favorite. More about this training here
Beginners - If you are new to this whole thing just start out simple. Start with some walks. Move onto jumping rope (one of the best and most used cardio you can find). Then to hikes with unstable ground and steep elevation changes. Then take your hike to a run through trails. These works outs can be lots of fun and very addictive.