Continuing Your Exercise Program

If you started an exercise program after the holidays, it may be time to upgrade the program intensity a little. Hopefully you have been inching up the length of time of your exercise to the 30-minute range. Longer sessions of medium intensity exercise are very good for the cardio-vascular system (heart). Runners call this type of exercise "LSD" (long slow distance).

After a month of your exercise program, you should have a pretty good base and are ready to add a little intensity. Intensity generally means that your heart rate will increase due to faster or more resistance. (Incorporating inclines, hills, drag tube or weight) It is best to ease intensity into your exercise routine.

If you're walking, then all you have to do is walk faster or go up hills to add intensity. If you're swimming you can swim faster, use a drag tube or paddles to get extra intensity. What you need to do is stress the heart slightly (get your pulse up a little) and then let your pulse return to a normal exercise rate. In practical terms this would be walking for five minutes to warm up your body and then increasing your speed for one minute. At the end of the one minute, faster pace return to your normal pace for five minutes. You can repeat this cycle over and over during your exercise - one-minute faster pace then five minutes normal pace.

This type of workout is often call "repeats," "intervals" or "sets." Once you get used to doing repeats you can start to vary the length of the "fast" or "hard" interval as well as the  "rest" or "easy" interval - you can also vary your pace. I like to walk hills for my intervals; they certainly get my pulse up. There is a nice hill near home that I use for my intensity repeat exercise sessions. I start my walk a quarter of a mile before the hill, and once I reach the top of the hill I turn around and walk back to the start. I then repeat the hill four or five times.