The Very Best Exercise Program - What You Need To Know
If you want to start an exercise program, you may have been doing some reading about which are the best exercises for fat loss, or for cardiovascular health, or to help a bad back, or to improve your strength and muscle mass, or for whatever particular goal you have in mind. Regardless of what you want to accomplish, you'll find experts with opposing viewpoints, and if you wait until one of those experts proves his point beyond a shadow of a doubt, you'll never start working out!
As an example, say you want to add some muscle by doing strength training. If you begin to do some research, you'll see that some experts say you should train only occasionally with very short workouts while incorporating extreme intensity, taking your muscles to failure and sometimes beyond through the use of forced reps, drop sets and similar techniques. However, for many people, exercise workouts like this become aversive very quickly - meaning that you begin to dread your exercise sessions. A minority, however, really likes these very intense workouts and will thrive on them.
At the opposite extreme there are experts that advise working out four to six days a week in marathon outings that take two hours each and work every tiny muscle on your body from every direction possible for multiple sets while using less than maximal weights. This type of exercise tends to drain most people's energy - and that assumes they have the time to actually fit it into their schedule. But there are people that do have the time and like spending that much of it in the gym.
Or take aerobic exercise. For years, long slow distance was prescribed as the preferred type of exercise workout to lose fat and improve cardiovascular health for people who did not intend to compete in athletic events. More recently, however, there have been a number of individuals who have derided that type of exercise, saying that it is not efficient at burning fat, and in fact will make your heart weaker instead of stronger. These people advocate interval training, which alternates periods of very hard aerobic exercise with segments of easier effort. In addition to taking less time, they claim this exercise trains your body to burn fat all the time, not just when exercising, and that it actually will make your heart more resistant to heart attacks and similar problems. Once again, some people prefer to work hard and short, while others enjoy longer workouts at an easier steady pace. Perhaps for the definitive answer, we should look to endurance athletes, most of whom incorporate both types of training in their preparation for competition. The bottom line is that if you want to start an exercise program that will actually allow you to reach your goals, you have to pick something that you can stick to. Let's say you have a choice between two types of exercise. For the sake of argument, we'll say that one of the programs has been categorically proven to be the best exercise workout ever devised for the goal you want to achieve. The other has been shown to work okay, but not as good as the first. You should do the first, right? Not unless you can stick to it for the long haul. Regardless of how good a program is, if you don't do it, it won't help you. Better you pick the second, less efficient program, if you like it more and can perform it on a regular basis - because actually sticking with a program for the long run is the most important factor in attaining success, whatever your goal.
|
