How to Start an Exercise Regimen: 3 Techniques That Work

Imagine this: You, laying on a beach wearing quite a revealing swim suit and catching admiring looks from opposite sex… Your body rocks! You live in a fit, lean, healthy & sexy body, and you feel good about showing it off. You feel good about yourself and you love your body. This is because you’re in a great physical shape and you know how to take care of yourself. You know how to use your body well and exercise it properly. You have a fitness regimen that works and yields great results.

You see, a lot of times people refer to the body as a machine. It’s not. It’s an organism: where machines wear out from use, organisms thrive upon use.

Organisms wear out from misuse, abuse and lack of use. Our bodies suffer from lack of use because they are designed to be moved and engaged in physical activities. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Turn off the TV and the video games, folks, and get active! Did you know that when you’re physically active, you are more likely to eat foods that are good for you, to get more sleep, and to take better care of your health in general? When you exercise, your body looks and feels better, which makes you feel better about yourself.

But what if you are feeling stuck… You are so comfortable in front of TV that starting an exercise regimen feels like a huge stretch… How do you actually motivate yourself into exercising and taking even baby steps towards the physique of your dreams? Perhaps, the physique you once had and lost over the years of misuse, abuse and lack of use of your body? Don’t despair, because I have an answer for you!

When it comes to starting an exercise regimen, I’ve found three great techniques that work. And I’m going to share them with you in this article.

1.  Get educated about the consequences of NOT exercising.

Yes, a bit of shock and awe fear can sometimes be enough to kick-start us into action. You can look at different sources of information on the subject. I’m simply going to give you a little ‘taste’ of what will inevitably happen to you if you adopt a couch potato lifestyle.

Why Couch Potato Syndrome Is Bad for Your Body and Overall Health

Adopting a sedentary lifestyle is one of the worst things you can do for your body and overall health. Lack of physical exercise negatively affects blood flow in the body. When you don’t get your blood pumping thanks to aerobic activities, the levels of nitric oxide drop. This causes the blood vessel walls to become distorted, which limits blood’s ability to pulse freely. This puts you at increased risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.

Without adequate blood flow, the blood vessels in the deep areas of the brain also become distorted, increasing the risk of tiny strokes. As the years go by, these tiny strokes accumulate and cause these deep brain areas to shut off and stop working. The deep brain areas control leg movement, coordinated body movement, and speed of thinking and behaving. These are some of the areas of the brain that are affected by Parkinson’s disease, which explains why these strokes produce a clinical picture that closely resembles this disease. This explains why people over the age of forty who don’t exercise aren’t as mentally sharp as those who are physically active.

Being a couch potato also makes you more vulnerable to high blood pressure, which in turn increases the risk of developing other brain-related health problems. Research in the journal Neurology shows that people  as young as forty-five with hypertension are more likely to experience problems with memory and thinking skills. In particular, middle-aged people with high diastolic blood pressure (the number on the bottom) are at greater risk than people with normal readings. For every 10% increase in the diastolic reading, the odds of an individual having cognitive problems jumped by about 7%. With nearly twenty thousand people involved in this study, it is the largest to investigate the link between hypertension and memory problems.

These findings support those of the Honolulu Study of Aging, which concluded that middle-aged people between the ages of forty and sixty who have untreated high blood pressure are at greater risk for developing dementia. The damage from inactivity can be devastating. Basically, when you shun exercise, you can say good-bye to all the brain and body health and vitality.

2. Align your exercise with something that brings you joy.

The best exercise is the one that you’re willing to do. Even better is the one that you’re willing to do that you actually enjoy so you’re looking forward to doing it and that’s different for every person. It can be dancing, yoga, walking in nature, etc. or whatever feels good to YOU. It will be a good thing if it varies throughout the year.

So, the best activities, the best fitness training, comes from the activities you enjoy, the ones you’re willing to do and find that you CAN do and that you WILL do at a level of reasonable challenge so that you can adapt to that, you can develop your abilities.

As for me, I’ve just recently discovered that I want to learn how to dance salsa. This is quite a turn from the physical activities I’ve been engaging in the past year… And guess what? I’m taking my first salsa dance lesson next week!

To jump-start your exercise regimen pick up a copy of Roger Haeske’s famous Lightning Speed Fitness Program. The Lightning Speed Fitness Program was designed to be simple and understood quickly. You can get super fitness in about 15 minutes per day and with just a couple of basic exercises categories. You can do these exercises just about anywhere. Your body is the gym. You don’t need equipment to get a fantastic workout. You can work out every single muscle in your body just by using your bodyweight. The key here is that most people don’t know the power of these bodyweight exercises done in a certain way. And Roger teaches you how to do exactly that, plus gives a lot of extra valuable information I’ve never found anywhere else before. The Lightning Speed Fitness Program changed the way I go about exercise forever. The program comes in a convenient downloadable format which means that you can start learning it within minutes!

3. The third and final technique is to get support and be held accountable in the early habit-forming stages.

Get yourself an exercise buddy or have your partner/loved one involved. Plan some physical activities with your kids. Tell your friends and family about your fitness goals. I know, it all sounds very simple. However, we all need to be reminded of simple things every now and then. And how many of us actually do them?

If you are new to fitness, ease into it gradually. Trying to do too much too fast can lead to injuries and burnout. It is just like when you were a kid. You had to crawl before you walked, and you had to use training wheels before you could ride a two-wheeler bike.

Making exercise a habit takes time. A habit is a series of actions your brain executes — when you tell it to do so — relatively automatically and without effort. It takes numerous repetitions before your brain learns to perform a function automatically. The best chance of making exercise a habit is to schedule a specific time and place to exercise each day or at least on several specific days each week. This doesn’t mean you have to do the same form of exercise each time. As mentioned above, it is better to vary your routine. This prevents boredom and helps keep you motivated. After a few months of sticking to the routine, you will find that you no longer think about whether or not to work out; you just do it. By this time, exercise will have become a habit that will help keep your body healthy and fit for a lifetime.

Make it a rule to exercise. Don’t give yourself an option of exercising or not. It should be a daily habit just like brushing your teeth.

Move it folks! Start an exercise plan now! There’s no time like the present to get on the move to better health and physique through exercise!

Here’s to Your Ever-Improving Fitness,

Vlada

Image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tagged As: exercise regimen, fitness regimen, how to start exercising, motivation to exercise, the lightning speed fitness program