A healthy body should be maintained with regular exercise. The earlier you start with a fitness program, the better. In that way, you’ll maintain your ideal body weight, boost your immunity, reduce the risk of chronic disease, improve self-esteem, and gain strength and endurance.
Fitness training involves a well-rounded routine, including strength training, balance training, aerobic fitness, core exercises, and flexibility exercises.
But, how do you start and maintain a simple fitness routine? Let’s find out.
Establish Your Fitness Baseline Data
It’s crucial to know your fitness baseline data in terms of your vital signs, body mass index (BMI), and the number or frequency of exercises you can do and sustain. This will assess your body composition, flexibility, and muscular and aerobic fitness.
Here are some examples of how to establish your fitness baseline data:
- Get and record your pulse rate before and after walking one and a half kilometers, or about a mile.
- Take note of how many sit-ups and push-ups you can do in two minutes.
- Record how long it takes for you to run two kilometers.
- Determine your BMI, which measures body fat depending on a person’s height and weight.
If your body mass index or BMI is around 25 to 29.9, then you’re considered to be overweight. For 30 and above, it means that you’re obese. The normal BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, lower than this range is considered underweight.
Design a Simple Fitness Routine
It’s important to know your health and fitness goals when designing a fitness routine or training program. Are you trying to build muscle, lose weight, or are you preparing for a major sport event? Also, you have to determine how much time you can devote to ensure that you keep up with your fitness routine.
Avoid inefficient, exhausting, and unnecessary exercises. Just keep everything simple, so you’ll likely stick to it. Also, you need to prepare your body by eating a balanced diet and taking supplements as needed, like the best protein powder, to help you stay energized while performing your fitness routine.
Here are the basic principles of designing a simple fitness routine:
- Consistency: Choose a full-body routine you can do two to three times a week.
- Targeted: Choose at least one exercise that targets the front and back of your legs (quads and hamstrings), push muscles (chest, arms, and shoulders), pull muscles (biceps, back, and grip), and your lower back and abdomen (core).
- Choose Four to Five Exercises: Target compound movements that work multiple muscles so you can build a full-body fitness routine.
For instance, you can perform squats, one-legged squats, lunges, and box jumps for your quads. Great exercises for your core include planks, side planks, mountain climbers, exercise ball crunches, jumping knee tucks, and hanging leg raise.
Take Advantage of Technology
Technology helps in self-care. You can use it to your advantage by using apps and software to track and monitor your health. Wearable technology, like a smartwatch, is a good example.
By tracking essential fitness metrics using wearable technology, you’ll know if your fitness routine plan is working for you. In that way, you can make the necessary changes. The data can be synced into various apps and programs so you can monitor your progress.
Here are the things you can track with a smartwatch or wrist activity tracker:
- Calories Burned
- Speed
- Daily Steps
- Heart Rate
- Sleep Quality
- Distance
Fitness apps can also help you keep up with your fitness training. For instance, C25K provides a free program for eight weeks that gives users about three workouts in a week to get you ready for a race. If you love yoga, you can try Daily Yoga. It’s a fitness app that helps strengthen your core with a library of detailed videos of more than 500 yoga poses.
Monitor Your Progress
From the baseline data, you can monitor your progress on a weekly basis. Check if you’re showing improvement by checking your weight and BMI. Obtain your vital signs and determine how the number of exercises you can do for a specific period of time.
For instance, doing more push-ups or pull-ups without getting easily exhausted, say in two to three minutes, is a good sign of improvement.
Conclusion
Don’t hesitate to start your personalized fitness routine. It doesn’t have to be an athletic type of training. Incorporating simple exercises with realistic goals is better than exhausting yourself and completely surrendering at the end.
The consistency and quality of exercises are more important to attain better health and fitness.