Health Fitness Guide for Beginners

Ways To Enhance Your Stamina

To enhance stamina (your capacity to ‘keep going’), you should do aerobic or ‘cardiovascular’ exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is the type that actually helps your heart — research shows that even 30 minutes walking a day can decrease unhealthy cholesterol (LDL) levels and scale back blood pressure and its excessive energy demand helps you shed extra pounds too.

This sort of training typically makes use of the large muscle groups of the body, such as legs, back, and chest, and is of a fairly extended nature (in other words, 20 minutes, rather than a couple of minutes). It should be intense sufficient to make you heat up, sweaty, and a bit breathless however not so intense which you can’t sustain it for any length of time.

If you are able to keep a conversation (albeit a slightly breathless one!) you’ve got the intensity right. To start with, duration rather than intensity matters. The harder stuff comes afterward!

Ways To Enhance Your Strength

Strength training, as the name suggests, is all about enhancing the strength of your muscle groups. However even in case you aren’t thinking about increasing your biceps or streamlining your thighs, this type of exercise is vital because it strengthens the ‘connective’ tissues, similar to ligaments and tendons, and helps to preserve bone density, so you’re extra pain and injury-resilient.

Research reveals that a higher muscle mass helps to protect your metabolic rate as you grow old.

There are additional advantages that are nothing to do with the muscle groups and joints. Research reveals that a higher muscle mass helps to protect your metabolic rate as you grow old (when usually, it might be falling). Strength training additionally enhances the body’s glucose uptake, decreasing the chance of diabetes, and can assist you to keep healthy blood pressure.

Strength training (or ‘resistance training’) is traditionally carried out in a fitness center using weights however that’s definitely not the only approach to do it! So long as the muscle groups need to ‘resist’ an exterior pressure that’s greater than what they’re used to, they are going to get stronger. Whether that force is a dumbbell, elastic resistance tube, and even gravity, is unimportant, so far as your muscle groups are concerned. There are lots of workouts you are able to do yourself, without equipment at the house.

Ways To Enhance Your Suppleness

Lastly, let’s look at flexibility. People often assume suppleness means having the ability to wrap your legs around your neck, or at the very least touch your toes, however actually, it’s just about having the ability to move your joints and muscles via their full range of motion. As we age, our flexibility declines quickly as collagen fibers inside the muscles stiffen.

It’s important that we stretch and mobilize frequently, to make sure that we don’t end up stiff and motionless, with short, tight muscles. Good flexibility is an asset each in the day by day life (reaching that high shelf) and sport (stretching out to return a tennis ball over the net) and being supple helps you keep good posture, in addition to minimizing your risk of getting injured throughout the activity.

Health specialists suggest that we include all three kinds of training in our weekly regime. The table beneath gives guidelines on how much we must be doing of every type. However don’t worry if it’s starting to sound as if getting fit is destined to take up half your waking hours, there are lots of methods you’ll be able to fit in exercise to enhance your stamina, strength, and suppleness.

FREQUENCY – 3-5 exercises per week 

INTENSITY – 55-90% maximum heart rate (the maximum number of times your heart can beat per minute) 

TIME – 20-60 minutes steady or intermittent effort.

STRENGTH TRAINING 

FREQUENCY – 2-3 days per week 

INTENSITY – Depending on the desired final result 

TIME – Adequate to work for all the main muscle groups.

FLEXIBILITY TRAINING 

FREQUENCY  – 2-3 days per week 

INTENSITY – Stretch to the point of mild discomfort, not pain 

TIME – 15-30 seconds per stretch for flexibility upkeep. Longer for remedial stretching.


Chances are you’ll not assume that merely putting a bit extra effort into your each day activities would have a lot of influence on your overall health, however, think once more. By combining every day ‘life-style activity’ with extra structured exercises can result in considerable health benefits.

Now we now have a concept of what health is all about, how are we going to make it happen? Devoting time to structured exercises (whether they be to construct strength, enhance cardio fitness, or improve posture and flexibility) is crucial.

However, there’s no use putting in weekly fitness center classes if you spend the rest of your time sprawled out on the couch or hunched in front of the computer. By fitting in exercise, your each day routine could make an unlimited distinction to your well being and health.