Jump Start Your Fitness Program With A Balanced Approach
How balanced is your health and fitness program? Are you hitting all the important areas, such as strength, stamina, flexibility, and diet?
It's easy to get into a rut when you've been exercising for awhile. And if you haven't been exercising, you will probably re-start your program doing pretty much the same things you were doing before.
In my experience, most people tend toward a certain type of exercise which dominates their training time and energy.
The two major camps are strength training versus aerobics or cardio. Seems like many people either predominantly “do” cardio (or aerobics), or they tend to hit the weights. Sometimes they throw in a little stretching, such as yoga or Pilates, for good measure.
While it's important to focus more energy and time in the areas that are lacking, it's equally important to have some balance and variety in your training.
After all, variety is the spice of life. If you keep doing the same type of workout, over and over again, you get diminishing (or even disappearing) results. You will also get bored, which means it's more likely you will quit your program, especially when you hit the inevitable plateaus.
On the other hand, when you have some balance in your training, you'll find that you are more enthusiastic about it. Changing the combination or order of elements in your workout can add a wonderful dimension. The variety keeps you (and your body) guessing - and craving more.
When I work with people, I like to use the analogy of the wheel to help them visualize whether they are balanced in their life, or in the goals they have set.
Take out a blank piece of paper and draw a wheel with several spokes. Each spoke represents an area of your life: perhaps career or business, school, financial, health and fitness, family, personal development, and so forth.
Here's the tricky part: the length of each spoke should be representative of how well you are doing in each of these areas. Doing well: longer spoke. Doing poorly, or not doing at all: shorter spoke.
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