Day 13

Your “nice” day again, or it maybe a day when you get a chance to do your bike ride, or your long walk, of your run of the week or whatever takes your fancy. Traditionally as i spoke about last week, you may take it a little easier on your eating today, and have a little bit of what you fancy, who knows? The chances are that those treats may not taste quite as nice this week, as cyril pointed to in his posts this week.

Here’s a quick one again on exercise whether you’re training or not today. Many people who exercise quite regularly don’t seem to get the results and here’s why. I see it on the coastal path typically every weekend. The low intensity bike ride is fun and great in its own context and WILL give you some good health benefits. In fact, most of us feel very comfortable with low intensity workouts, and if you leave most people alone to do what they want, they will train at too low a level to really make lasting change to their bodies and the rate they burn calories throughout the day.

This is another reason why many people give up their training programmes, their own training is simply too easy, and therefore won’t bring the results they were really after in the first place. It’s great going on the coastal path and going too easy and having fun, stopping for a coffee etc, but the majority of your workouts should be something a lot more, and i mean by that workouts DONE WITH PURPOSE! I talk about it all the time when people ask me on here how hard they should train. I tell them that on a 1-10 level, 1 being sitting down, 10 flat out, i tell them to aim for at least a 7 or 8 each time, and that should make you successful.

Another think with low intensity training, you burn lots of calories and thats great, but that makes you very hungry, and you will eventually eat back those calories very quickly indeed, i think most of you have experienced that.

Here’s another thing for you, the whole idea and premise behind our training should be to challenge our bodies and have it react by getting stronger and healthier, if you don’t challenge it, there will be little or no change going on. I repeat again, any exercise is good, but training with a purpose and challenging yourself is so much better. If you’re going to exercise, let’s make it worthwhile and it doesn’t mean killing yourself either, so please don’t misunderstand me!!

The bottom line is that calories burned during your workout ARE NOT REALLY THAT IMPORTANT. Challenging your cardiovascular system REALLY IS IMPORTANT. Once you get into this way of training, and you enter this zone, you’re going to be hugely successful!

Keri