How often should I exercise?

More and more people realise exercise is important for all of us. But how often should I exercise?

This question needs to be specified in order to answer it properly. The real question is: what goal do I want to reach, and how much should I exercise to meet my goal?

Het Voedingscentrum (Dutch institution to educate on food and health) provides a guide line on their website that showes the amount of exercise a healthy person needs in a week time.

These are their tips:

• Moving is good, moving more is better
• Engage at least 150 minutes a week in activities that require moderate or heavy intensive exercise, spread over several days.
• Do muscle and bone strengthening activities at least twice a week (for the elderly including balance exercises).
• Avoid lots of sitting still.

Moderate intensive exercise makes your heart rate and your breathing go up slightly, but talking remains possible. This includes walking, cycling, swimming and the somewhat heavier household chores, such as washing windows or working in the garden.

Heavy intensive exercise makes you breath heavy and sometimes even pant. Examples of heavy intensive exercise are running, cycling (fast) and sports like soccer and hockey.

Sitting, lying down or standing activities like cooking, grochery shopping or darting do not count as exercise.

What do you want to achieve with exercising?

Are you healthy and do you want to stay that way on the long term, then the guide lines above are sufficient.

Things change when your goal changes. Different goals need different approaches. Do you for instance want to work on muscle building, losing weight, of getting fit for a marathon, you need a different training program.

When we design a personal training schedule we take in account the following important questions:

• What are your personal goals?
• How are your healthy and fit are you?
• Are there other issues that can influence reaching your goals?

Realistic exercising goals

It is very important to formulate your goals as specific and realistic as possible. Clear expectations avoid dissapointments. A personal trainer can help you formulate your goals.

Eventually the aim is to keep exercising on a regular basis, even if you already reached your goal. The personal training will teach you how to work out in a responsible way, without forcing your body. These are important tools to make excercising on a regular basis easier.

Building a routine and maintaining it

A personal trainer can help you build an exercising routine. During a personal training program we not only look at the time your exercising with us, but we take also in account what you can do outside our gym to get closer to reaching your goal. This can be changes in nutrition, live style, or movement. The personal trainer will help you build a healthy routine, a routine you can maintain even when the personal training program is over.

A personal training program does not only make you reach your specific goal, it also provides an exercise routine. You learn how to meet the minimum excercise criteria you need every week.

Are you interested to know what exercising is suited for you? Or do you want to meet us during an intake interview? Please contact us.