Keeping your exercises simple and effective

Moe Johnson Running with Moe

Running and walking are some of the easiest and best activities to participate in for fitness. Almost anybody can do these activities, and one of the best things about giving it a try for the first time is that not much equipment is needed. A good pair of walking or running shoes is about the only equipment to buy if you want to have a comfortable beginning. Later in the program you might try for some exercise clothes that allow comfort in moving without any restrictions in the legs or arms.

While the objective in walking or running, or any exercise, is fitness and improved health it can also be used for other benefits. Increased strength in the muscles of the body and even cardiorespiratory benefits to improve mobility and breathing. Exercise in general burns calories and that is a good method of losing weight.

A problem that often occurs is when individuals try to use outside equipment to think they can improve these simple exercises and achieve faster and better benefits. The one that comes to mind that I still see is the wearing of heavy or nylon clothes to increase the amount of sweat generated for added weight loss. There is a consequence to increasing sweating with extra clothing. The reason a person sweats is that the energy used by the muscles generates heat and body temperature and sweating helps release this buildup of heat. When the sweat is covered by extra clothes the evaporation of the sweat that cools the body is prevented. Now the core temperature of the body increases and performance is affected. The easiest analogy is to think how well a person can perform any exercise when they have a temperature from illness or inflammation. The other side effect is the loss of water from sweating. Think again how a person is affected when they become dehydrated. When a person becomes dehydrated, performance deteriorates. And poor performance in ventures other than exercise can be witnessed in jobs that require physical labor when a person becomes dehydrated. If dehydration becomes too great, health is affected. One of the best examples I use is for athletes that have to make weight for an event. Wrestlers, boxers, and jockeys, are examples. Having coached wrestling for many years I have seen the results of wrestlers losing too much body fluid from sweating and end up having a very poor performance on the mat or even end up in a hospital. I used to tell my wrestlers to take the sweat jackets off and keep wrestling to burn off those last few calories. This way they improved their wrestling skills, got more conditioning, and still lost weight. When I taught at West Point they banned the use of sweat clothes to lose weight when too many cadets ended up in the infirmary from trying to lose weight and became severely dehydrated.

While walking and running are the most common forms of easy exercise to improve health and to lose weight there are other activities that are also beneficial. Swimming is easy and while a person may think a person doesn’t sweat in swimming that is not true. Exercise increases the body temperature and the fact that cool water washes the sweat away doesn’t mean a person did not sweat. The one problem with swimming is that the better swimmer you are the less effort you use. And with a variety of strokes that can be used swimming can be a great exercise. Water aerobics is good for non-swimmers.

Lifting weight is another good form of exercise to improve strength and actually lose weight. Weight lifting is an activity that can be used to gain weight because of the increase in muscle mass or to lose weight. The key to either gain or lose weight by lifting weights is to follow a program designed for what you want as an outcome. The one benefit some research has found is that after lifting weights the metabolism that is burning calories lasts for up to 12 or more hours after the person quits lifting.

Bike riding is considered one of the most efficient forms of movement and transportation. The key is to get a good bike and have some gears to keep a constant pedaling speed. The advancement in the variety of bikes available for a person to use as exercise is at a level where almost any person can find a bike to fit their needs. As a rough estimate comparing running to bike riding is a four to one ratio. You need to pedal four miles to equal one mile of running. This is only a rough estimate as the type of bike and terrain where you pedal will affect this ratio. There are not many excuses not to exercise for fitness.