Tag fitness goals

You know you should walk more, but sometimes it seems like such a chore. Are you trying to discover how to make walking more fun, so that you’ll guarantee you continue to practice this healthy and simple exercise? There are tons of ways to creatively make walking more fun and enjoyable, and when you practice the fun walking tips below, you will find yourself looking forward to your regular hikes.

Get a Dog to Make Walking More Fun

Get a dog. Animal shelters are full of friendly canines that are looking for a good home. In this way you may actually be saving a life while also providing yourself with a walking companion which can increase your sense of security as well. And since dogs require frequent walking, this helps you stick to a regular routine.

Enlist a Friend to Do Daily Walks With

Involve a friend. Many health experts say that you reach your fitness goals much more quickly when you get a friend involved. Since most people make friends with others who are a lot like themselves, chances are you know someone who would also like to add a walking regimen to their life. Get a friend, neighbor or family member involved in your exercise plan, and you will find yourself looking forward to your daily walks.

Listen to Podcasts or Your Favorite Music to Make Walking More Fun

Listen to your favorite podcast. Grab your earbuds and your MP3 player or smartphone, and use your walking time to catch up on your favorite podcasts. Feeding your mind while you lose weight and get in shape by walking is a great strategy to improve your overall health as you simultaneously stimulate your brain.

Start a Reward System to Make Walking More Fun

Pay yourself. Give yourself a set financial rate for walking. Perhaps you will reward yourself with $5 for every mile that you walk, or $1 for every 10 minutes. Physically pay yourself at the end of each walking session, and at the end of each month, use your walking “paycheck” to buy yourself a fun and rewarding gift.

Join a Group of Other Walkers or Hikers

Join a group. There are multiple hiking and walking groups in virtually every major city around the world. And if you do not have a group or organization dedicated to regular walking in your area, why not start one? This is a great way to socialize and have fun while positively impacting your overall fitness level.

Change Your Route to Make Walking More Fun

Discover new surroundings. Walking the same route around your neighborhood can quickly become boring. Get out and broaden your horizons by discovering a park beach, path or forest which is new to you. You can even substantially add to your walking enjoyment by simply choosing a new neighborhood or subdivision for your daily walk, and you may even meet and make new friends.

Get Your Family Involved to Make Walking More Fun

Family fitness is a win-win situation, but it may not be easy at first to get everyone to see the benefits of a family walking plan. Once each member of the family starts to look better and feel healthier, they will accept walking as a good thing, but getting to that point can be challenging. Engage your whole family with these tips:

• Instead of just one person always walking the dog, make it a family affair and part of your daily family walking fitness plan.
• Plan time in each day when the whole family goes for a walk. If time is not planned and coveted, it is easy for something else to take over that time slot.
• Make a friendly competition out of walking. Before starting your walking family fitness plan, record everyone’s weight. Once a week, have everyone weigh again and note the progress made. Once your kids start to see their weight drop, they will see the value of exercising.
• When going to the mall, park at the far end of the parking lot and walk in the rest of the way. Before shopping, take a few walking laps around the inside of the mall. Not only will your whole family get exercise going to and from the car, but they will also get exercise while walking in the mall.
• If your kids like playing in the park, walk there (if fit is close enough) instead of driving.
• On the weekends, plan a family hike. Educate yourself ahead of time so you can talk about what they are seeing on the hike. Not only will they get exercise, but they can learn something along the way.

Walking as a family does another thing – it makes each member accountable to the rest of the family. Nobody wants to be the one to let down the rest of the family, so everyone walks to avoid the disappointment.

Eat Healthy Because Making Walking More Fun is Only Half the Story

As good as walking is as a family fitness plan, it is only half the story; the other half is learning to eat healthy. Focus on your family eating healthy foods rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean meats. As a point of interest, talk about how the vegetable of the night is good for them. One passive education tactic that works is to post an article you read that day on the refrigerator door that expounds on some benefits of walking, being fit or healthy eating.

A family walking fitness plan is not only a great way for the whole family to get some exercise, but what better way is there to spend some quality family time together. So have the family members get off the couch, put down the game controllers and get out and walk! The whole family together will make walking more fun.

If you’d like to get more out of your walking for fitness plan, check out the “Guide to Setting Your Walking Fitness Goals” for more in depth knowledge on the subject of walking for fitness. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for the free MyFitnessNut.com Newsletter to be kept up to date on the latest health and fitness topics.

The March 2012 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine shows just how deadly sitting down can be.

Using data from over 265,000 individuals, the shocking research showed that people who sit for more than 11 hours a day experienced a 40% higher likelihood of dying from any cause.

And if you sit from 8 to 11 hours a day, you still experience a 15% higher probability of dying than those who sit for less than four hours each day.

The dangers caused by too much sitting include but are not limited to:

• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Colon cancer
• Breast cancer
• Heart Disease
• Metabolic Syndrome
• Heart attack

And Harvard researchers have shown that watching TV for just two hours a day increases your chances of developing Type II Diabetes by a full 20%.

That same 120 minutes of sitting and watching your favorite television programs means you are 15% more likely to develop heart disease as well, including possibly triggering a heart attack or stroke. And more than three daily hours of television viewing, which is generally done while sitting, substantially increases the danger of dying from any disease.

The dangers of sitting down all day are many as are the rewards of an active lifestyle. One HealthPop study showed that too much sitting combined with an overall sedentary lifestyle caused as many as 43,000 instances of colon cancer, as well as nearly 50,000 cases of breast cancer among the study participants.

And incredibly, simply standing instead of sitting, exercising, bending and stretching while sitting, and a couple of brisk walks a day can drastically reduce the chance that you will succumb to the dangers of sitting.

No other respected health organization than the World Health Organization has openly stated that physical inactivity and frequent sitting is the leading cause in a full 21 to 25% of all breast and colon cancers, according to their research. That same sedentary lifestyle and extended periods of sitting also contributes to at least 27% of Diabetes and a full 30% of ischaemic heart disease, according to WHO.

That same World Health Organization found that the dangers of sitting down all day are so plentiful, they consider a sedentary lifestyle one of the top 10 causes of all death and disability, making up for more than 300,000 early deaths annually in the US.

The dangers of sitting for extended periods of time, whether it be in your vehicle, at work or on your couch at home, cannot be ignored by those people looking to enjoy a healthy and fit lifestyle which leads to a longer and happier life. So, give this information to a friend or loved one and turn them into a workout buddy.

How Workout Dates Help You Stick To Your Goals

The key to attaining your fitness goals is to work out with consistency. You start a new exercise program filled with excitement and goals, but soon you are bored with the same exercise routine, discouraged by the lack of results, or sidetracked by life in general. Pretty soon, you are back to your old ways of sitting on the couch and eating ice cream and potato chips.

Keeping that excitement and commitment going over the long haul is hard, but here are some ways that can help you stay the course:

• find an exercise buddy
• schedule your workouts
• structure your workout time

Find an Exercise Buddy

Whether you exercise with a friend or your significant other, being accountable to someone other than yourself is a great way to keep you on track. When you commit to working out with someone, you do not want to let them down, nor do they want to let you down, so not showing up for a workout becomes more difficult than just going.

Schedule Your Workouts

If you are like me for something to get done, it has to be on my schedule. If not, something always takes priority and consequently the non-scheduled things take a backseat; workouts are no different.

However, by scheduling your workouts both on your personal calendar and the one you have at work, your workout time becomes just as important as anything else you have scheduled. If you are using an electronic calendar, such as Gmail or Yahoo, set the reminder so you get either an email or pop-up reminder a certain time before your workout is supposed to begin.

Structure Your Workout Time

Do you have a plan on what routine you are going to do each time you go to the gym? Do you know which days you are doing strength training and which days will be cardio?

A great way to make planning easier is to join some classes. That way the planning is done for you. Then, each week you know on Monday you have a spinning class at 1:00 p.m.; on Tuesdays, you have aerobics at 3:00 p.m., etc. This makes planning your fitness workouts much easier; it is harder to skip a workout when you know you have to be at a certain place at a certain time and other people are expecting you to be there.

Exercising on a consistent and routine basis will eventually become part of your healthy lifestyle. Eventually you will reach a point where you will feel guilty if you have to miss a session – even if it is due to something beyond your control.

But to get to that point, where exercising becomes second nature, requires diligent and deliberate dedication to succeed on your part. These “4 Tips To Make Exercise More Fun” can give you some additional ideas and you can visit http://MyFitnessNut.com and subscribe to the My Fitness Nut Newsletter to stay up to date on the latest health and fitness trends.

Knowing how much exercise you need each day is only half of the equation. You also have to know which type of activity you need. Exercise is broken down into two types of energy systems: aerobic and anaerobic, or cardio and strength training, respectively.

Aerobic

Exercise activities falling under this category are further broken down by intensity into moderate and vigorous. Moderate includes brisk walking, running (at a slow jogging pace), swimming, mowing the lawn, etc.; aerobic exercises get your heart rate up and can be performed for a long period of time. You should break a sweat, but still be able to talk while doing them.

Vigorous exercise includes such things as marathon running, long distance cycling and lap swimming. They get your heart rate up into the 70% to 80% of your target heart rate (220 minus your age). While doing activities at this intensity level, you are sweating more, breathing harder and you won’t be able to say more than a few words at a time.

Anaerobic

These include strength training activities like weightlifting or heavy kettle bell swings. Anaerobic exercises can only be performed for a short period of time due to the body not being able to produce enough energy to last longer than from a few seconds to three minutes.

To reap the most benefits from anaerobic, you should reach a point where it is hard to do the next repetition. Once you can do 12 to 15 repetitions per set, increase the amount of weight; your repetitions per set will then drop accordingly.

How Much Time Do You Need?

Most experts agree you should aim to get at least 30 minutes of exercise, or some type of physical activity, six days a week. This is further broken down into 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise spread over four days per week. Alternate in at least two days per week of anaerobic exercise that works all of the major muscle groups, such as the:

• legs
• hips
• back
• abdomen
• chest
• shoulders
• arms

Give your body time to rest and repair itself on the seventh day.

Exercise Session Duration

Many busy working professionals have a hard time finding a 30-minute chunk of time each day to exercise. However, what various studies have found is that three 10-minute periods of exercising per day is just as beneficial as one 30-minute period. For instance, you could go for a brisk walk in the morning, at noon and again in the evening; the health benefit is the same as walking briskly for one 30-minute period. Almost everyone can find a few 10 minute periods in their schedule each day.

For even more health benefits, keep the same intensity level, but double your weekly aerobic activity to 300 minutes. Another option, as you get more fit, is to gradually change out some of your moderate intensity level exercises for more vigorous ones.

Why You Must Make Exercise A Priority

If you are serious about your health and fitness plans, you definitely must make exercise a priority to accomplish your goals. Did you know that the human brain will always cause you to move toward your most dominant thought? This is why a simple thought can create such incredible results in your life, and in the world around us. This is also why when you make exercise a top priority in your life, your desired results come quicker, and they are easier to maintain over time.

Human beings are intrinsically lazy, but crave direction and order. This is why scheduling activities leads to a much higher success rate in anything that you do. And when you habitually do things over and over at the same time on the same day, it is hard to get out of that rhythm. Also, often time in our lives we get better results when we insist on them.

Here are a few simple ways to make exercise a priority in your life, setting up an autopilot delivery of the benefits that exercise delivers:

Schedule Your Exercises

There are a reason that calendars and day planners are literally a billion dollar a year business. People do more things that are written down and scheduled than they do as a matter of impulse. Scheduling your exercise regimen on a daily, weekly and monthly basis where you must refer to it and hold yourself accountable will instantly program your mind and body for the desired physical and mental preparation before the scheduled exercise.

Make Exercise a Habit

Did you realize that human beings will unconsciously make a habit out of anything they do for a given period of consecutive days or sessions? Multiple scientific studies have shown that repeating the same behavior or action, on the same schedule, at the same time 17 to 21 times switches an activity from the conscious mind to the unconscious, where actions are automatic, and not a choice.

Make exercise a priority at the same time and stick to that schedule religiously, and you will find soon enough that it is virtually impossible to miss a workout.

Do Not Take No for an Answer

If you decide that you are going to exercise no matter what set of obstacles gets in your way, you will definitely accomplish your weight loss, health and fitness goals. Human beings are constantly achieving levels of performance which were previously considered impossible. And you can do the same when you simply refuse to put exercising on a back burner.

The human brain is the most powerful and capable computer of all time. When you schedule exercise at the same time, achieve 17 to 21 consecutive exercise sessions and develop the unwavering mindset that exercise is a top priority in your life, you may be surprised at how easy it is to achieve your health and fitness goals.

If you’re not very active when you start out with your exercise workout routine, it would be a good idea to read 15 Minute Fitness Tip #6 “Exercise Tips for Those Who Live a Sedentary Lifestyle” for a good place to start.