Certified Personal Trainer and Health Educator Nicole Nichols makes some interesting points, or should I say, truths, about exercise. Here’s a couple:
Working out will always feel hard.
Exercise is work. It elevates your heart rate, makes you somewhat breathless, and causes your muscles to burn. It’s tiring—sometimes exhausting. Yes, exercise does get easier with time, but it will never be “easy.” If it were easy, it wouldn’t be exercise. You see, beyond just getting your body moving (which is great but will only get you so far), exercise has to challenge you. You have to work past your comfort zone in order to train your heart, lungs, and muscles to get stronger and fitter. Over time, yes it will become easier to walk at the 3 mph pace you started, but once that becomes easy, it’s time to walk faster, which brings me to another cold, hard truth: You have to work harder as you get fitter. Think of it exercise as a challenge to continuously improve on what you just accomplished.
Not every movement or activity counts as exercise.
Let me preface this one by saying that any body movement is good for you. Whether you’re fidgeting at your desk, walking across the office to talk to a co-worker, taking a single flight of stairs instead of the elevator, or playing Wii tennis—all movement is good, especially when you’re just starting out. But here’s the real truth: Not all movement is “exercise.” The two are very, very different. For any activity to count as true exercise, it has to meet certain parameters, like lasting at least 10 continuous minutes (so those stairs you took or that walk from your car to the store doesn’t count as a workout), it has to elevate your heart rate to an aerobic level (that “hard” feeling I mentioned above), and more. If you count all of these “activities” or body movements you do each day as workouts, then you are only shortchanging yourself—and you could be hurting your weight loss efforts.
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Delia Dolor is an all-round media professional. She produces and presents television, radio and live shows. She is also a public speaker, magazine and print editor.
Delia has been credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication and to have influenced the way talk shows in the Caribbean can influence the lives of others.
