How to Increase Fitness

Do you suffer from laziness and lethargy? Do you find your limbs heavy when you intend to go for a picnic with your partner or friends? Do you fear sagging and fat gain? Do you want to dance like a butterfly to the melodies of rock and salsa? Is poor fitness holding you back from enjoying your life? Let’s restore the fitness of professional athletes and dancers, without risking health damage, such as dehydration and neuromuscular fatigue. Let’s get to know the state of fitness in a healthy and comfortable way.

What is Fitness?

It is a state of health and well-being. More specifically, the ability to perform aspects of sports, work, and daily activities.

Fitness is generally achieved through proper nutrition, moderate-intensity physical exercise, adequate rest, along with a basic recovery plan.

Before ”The Industrial Revolution”, fitness was defined as the ability to carry out the activities of the day without fatigue or lethargy. Nowadays, fitness is a measure of the body’s ability to function efficiently in both work and leisure activities. In addition to a person enjoying good health, high resistance to movement deficiency diseases, an efficient immune system, and facing emergencies that may hinder his life.

Exercises to Increase Fitness

Exercises to Increase Fitness include:

Aerobic Exercises

These are exercises that increase the heart rate. Thus, improving the body’s oxygen consumption, and this ultimately leads to improved cardio-respiratory fitness and increased stamina.
These exercises are an important part for all people who do exercise. From professional athletes to casual trainees and beginners.

Notable examples of aerobic exercise include:

• Jogging: running at a steady, gentle pace. This type of exercise is great for maintaining weight and building the cardiovascular base for more intense exercise later on. Read also: Walking or running?
• Work on an elliptical machine: This is a stationary exercise machine that is used to perform walking or running without causing excessive stress on the joints. This type of exercise is ideal for people who suffer from pain in the hip, knees and ankles.
• Walking: moving at a fairly regular pace for a short, medium or long distance.
• Treadmill Training: Many treadmills have programs built in that offer many different exercise plans. An effective cardiovascular activity is to alternate between running and walking. Warm up first by walking, then pause between walking for three minutes and running for three minutes.
• Swimming: using the arms and legs to keep themselves afloat in the water and to move either forward or backward. This is a good full-body workout for those looking to strengthen their core while improving cardiovascular endurance.

• Cycling: Riding a bike usually requires longer distances than walking or jogging. This is another low-impact exercise on the joints that is great for improving leg strength.

Anaerobic Exercise

Anaerobic exercises are characterized by high-intensity movements that are performed in a short period of time to increase fitness. They are fast, high-intensity exercises that do not require the body to use oxygen to produce energy. It also helps to enhance strength, endurance and speed. Bodybuilders use it to increase exercise intensity.

Anaerobic exercise is believed to increase the metabolic rate, allowing a person to burn extra calories while the body recovers from exercise, and this is due to an increase in body temperature and an increase in ”Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC)” after exercise is over.

Notable examples of anaerobic exercise include:

• Weight Training: A popular type of strength training for developing skeletal muscle strength and size.

• Isometric Exercise: helps maintain strength, as it is a muscle movement in which no visible movement occurs and resistance matches muscle tension.
• Speed running: running short distances as fast as possible and training for muscle explosion.

Also read: Exercises to Increase Back Flexibility

• HIIT (High-intensity interval training): Alternating short bursts (lasting about 30 seconds) of intense activity with longer periods (three to four minutes) of lower intensity activity.

Fitness Obstacles

Many factors can influence our plans to become more physically active. These factors include: The many technological advances and conveniences that have made our lives easier and less stressful, and many personality variables including mental, behavioral and psychological factors.

Understanding common barriers to physical activity and developing strategies to overcome them can help us make fitness a part of everyday life.

Barriers can be classified into external and internal barriers, where external barriers include the environment, while internal barriers include personal factors such as personal preferences and attitudes.

Personal Obstacles:

People’s lives in many ways have become easier and less hectic due to the advancement in technology and conveniences. Also, everyone has many personal reasons or explanations for being inactive.

Let’s recall together the most common reasons for not adopting more physically active lifestyles:

• Insufficient time to exercise.
• Being upset with exercises.
• Lack of self-motivation.
• Not enjoying exercise.
• Boredom with exercise.
• Lack of confidence in your ability to be physically active (low self-efficacy).
• Fear of being injured or having a recent injury.
• Lack of self-management skills, such as the ability to set personal goals and control.
• Lack of progress or rewarding progress towards these goals.
• Lack of encouragement, support, or companionship from family and friends.
• Lack of parks, sidewalks, bike paths, or safe and enjoyable walking.
• Close distances between home and workplace.

The top three barriers to sustained physical activity throughout adult life are:

1. Time.
2. Energy.
3. Motivation.

Environmental Obstacles:

The environment in which we live greatly affects our level of physical fitness. Many factors in our environment affect us.

Obvious factors include: Access to walking paths, cycling paths and entertainment facilities. Factors such as traffic, availability of public transportation and pollution may also have an impact.

Other environmental factors include our social environment, such as the support of family, friends, and community spirit. We can make changes in our environment through several steps, including: campaigns to support walking, laws that provide safer communities, and the creation of new entertainment facilities.

Tips to Increase Fitness

Is it strength? Or the heart? Or body structure? Or is it endurance and strength?

Yes dear, there are many measures of fitness, as this word means something different to each individual. Which makes it difficult to provide a comprehensive guide to improving your fitness.

Having your own personal trainer will help you develop a program tailored to your specific needs, but we have prepared a list for you to help you increase your fitness even when you do not have a coach of your own and whatever your goal is. So, follow us and follow the following steps to get the desired high fitness:

• Choose a reason to be more active:

First you should ask yourself: Why do I want to be active? Why do I want to increase my fitness? You may want to lose weight, sleep better, or increase your energy and gain muscle strength and flexibility, or you just want to feel good, so determining the goal of your access to fitness is important and helpful to you.

• Choose an activity you enjoy:

Choose activities you enjoy, as diversity is the key. If you get bored with one activity, try a different one.

• Set goals and track your progress:

Set a realistic goal for yourself to achieve, and keep a diary or chart or use an online app to track your progress. You can also track your daily steps using a pedometer or a walking app on your phone.

And most importantly my dear, is to enjoy the challenge. And remember to go slowly.

• Don’t punish yourself:

Remember that everyone has bad days when they may not do any physical activity, so just ignore these days and get back on track the next day.

• Give yourself rewards:

Give yourself a nice, likable reward when you achieve goals or take steps to reach a goal, preferably a healthy reward so you can feel extra energy and enthusiasm.

• Try to do the activity during the days of the week:

Most of us lead very busy lives, where we do some family jobs and duties. Setting aside a specific time each day will help you build activity into your daily routine.

• Get support:

Go for a walk or run with friends, colleagues or family to make it a more enjoyable and motivating physical activity for you. You can also join an online club or community to track your progress.

A reminder:

• Choose the right activities for you. Get advice from your general doctor.
• Spread your activities throughout the day and week.
• Add activities that increase muscular strength and endurance 2 to 3 days a week.
• Start with short repetitions that enable you to reach your goal, for example, 30 minutes of activity a day. divide by 10 minutes each time,
• Aim for moderate-intensity activity. as moderate activity raises your heart rate and makes you breathe faster and feel warmer.

For example:

• Brisk walking 1 mile in 15 minutes.
• Water aerobics.
• Cycling slower than 10 miles per hour.
• Dancing.
• Gardening.

Read too: Cardio first or resistance training?

What are the Age Appropriate Activities?

Activity for your age

You should aim for a certain amount of activity depending on your age:

• Children and youth: At least 60 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per day.
• Adults: At least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity 5 days a week.
• The elderly: At least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity 5 days a week.

If you are unable to reach these goals, start with small goals and work your way through the odds until you reach these levels.

Activity for the elderly

Adults age 65 or older who are generally fit and don’t have health conditions that limit their mobility should try to get active every day.

For example:

• At least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity each week, such as walking or dancing.
• Muscle-strengthening exercises two or more days a week, for example digging, carrying groceries, step aerobics, hand weights and yoga,
• even daily chores such as shopping, cooking or housework help as a break between sitting periods.

And don’t forget that the elderly are at risk of falling. So try to include any of the following in your daily routine to improve your stability:

• Yoga, Tai Chi, or Pilates.
• Walking backwards and sideways.
• Walking on heels and toes.
• Standing up from a sitting position.
• Stand on one foot.

Measure Your Fitness Progress

Here my dear, you must be completely honest with yourself, and honestly measure your progress, because this will help you determine what works and what doesn’t work for your body.

And keep in mind that what you choose to record will largely depend on your goals. You can track monthly improvements if you walk a certain distance each day, or monitor the weights you lift. All of these will give you an insight into what was going right and what went wrong in your training.

However, the self-report will be accurate and useful the more you do it, so pay attention. If you decide to discard a few pounds on the scale or remove a few seconds from your best workout time of the month, you’ll negate the point of measuring these things in the first place, and end up slowing down your progress and wasting your time.

Your body is used to exercises

When you get fitter, you should be sure to continually re-evaluate and adjust the difficulty of the exercises to maintain progress.

This concept is known as “progressive overload” in resistance training (strength training). It refers to slowly increasing weights, as your body adapts and gets used to lifting weights. Therefore, you must increase the weight with the passage of time. This will help increase muscle mass and strength.

But beware not to push yourself to hard, or cause yourself unintentional harm, So make your progress thoughtful and appropriate to what you have reached. Also read: Common Mistakes during Exercise

Include stretching and flexibility exercises in your workout

Even if your intention is to build muscle and get a lean body, diversity is the key to improving your fitness in an effective and sustainable way.

You are looking for strength, flexibility, agility and coordination, as they are all very important skills. But it will not be achieved if you always adhere to one type of exercise for all of the exercise period. Therefore, it is good to add stretching and flexibility exercises to your exercise program. It gives your body enough stretch to help the muscles take their correct and proper shape.

Among the most important stretching and flexibility exercises, we remind you of Pilates exercises and weekly yoga sessions.

HIIT exercise

It is important to know that the recommended amount of aerobic exercise for adults each week is 150 minutes. These exercises can be as simple as a walk in the park. But if you’re looking to get fit quickly, you might want to ramp it up a bit.

Hence, HIIT is very effective when it comes to improving fitness.Research has shown that HIIT can help you reach your goals much faster than traditional stationary aerobic exercise, and this is due to the ability of this interval training to increase your ability to burn calories, even after you finish the exercise.

HIIT workouts will also quickly improve your fitness and workout, which will improve your stamina. In addition to boosting heart health and levels of “happiness” hormones in the bloodstream.

HIIT can also help you lose belly fat while retaining lean muscle mass.

You can follow the video to find out what is HIIT and its relationship to youth and health, as well as a way to test for yourself whether you are doing it correctly or not?

Remember to get fit

People who aim to improve their fitness often ignore strength training. But you should know dear that building muscle through strength training is an essential tool within your fitness exercises.

Therefore, you will make significant contributions to your overall fitness level by making sure you complete your fitness routine by working each major muscle group at least twice a week.

As more muscle mass means more calories burned at rest. In addition to improving strength, endurance and stability, which are broadly applicable skills across a range of fitness exercises.

Do things you are not good at

We humans often tend to stick to the things we’re good at. You should know dear, that if you want to achieve what you aspire to, you have to do the things you’re not good at. Especially in aerobics.

As the exercises you hate are the ones that express how much you need them. Because through them, you are moving the muscles and sleeping areas in your body, which requires more effort and focus.

It may require more motivation and a lot more effort to work on the exercises that you suffer from. But remember that in the long run this hard work will pay off far more than if you gave it up.

So my dear, Remember that fitness is very important in our modern age. Thus, you must transcend personal and environmental barriers, adapt to what suits your body of exercises, while working to permanently raise the level of fitness, and you will live happy within your own body.

Frequently Asked Questions about How to Increase Fitness

Sources:

Fit and Healthy

Keep Fit

Also read:

Rest Days from Exercise to Burn More Fat

The Importance of Correct Breathing during Exercise