How to Create an Effective Fitness Routine - Part 1

Tips to Help you Stay Fit and Juice Up a Workout

Key Points

• Five types of activities are essential for well-rounded exercise program: aerobic exercise, strength training, balance exercises, flexibility exercises, and relaxation exercises.

• Five techniques can juice up your workouts: power training, interval training, periodization, task-specific training, and complex workouts.

Five Activities to Keep You Fit

1. Aerobic activities

Often called cardio or endurance activities, aerobic activities are great for burning calories and paring down unwanted fat. These activities—think of walking, biking, running, and swimming—push large muscles to repeatedly contract and relax. This temporarily boosts your heart rate and breathing, allowing more oxygen to reach your muscles and tuning up cardiovascular endurance.

Experts once believed cardio activities were beneficial only if you kept your heart rate hammering in the aerobic range—70% to 85% of your maximum heart rate—for a specified length of time. (Maximum heart rate is roughly estimated as 220 minus your age.) But research now shows you’re gaining benefits even when working at a more moderate intensity.

How often to perform

The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity (such as a brisk walk) or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week. You can also perform an equivalent combination of the two intensities. As you start to work out more often, you’ll notice gains as exercises become easier.

Move a muscle

Muscle is tethered to bone by cords of tissue called tendons. A single muscle can contain 10,000 to more than a million muscle fibers, packed in numerous neat bundles and swathed in connective tissue known as the epimysium. Groups of muscle fibers receive marching instructions from a single nerve cell called a motor neuron. Together, this combination of nerve cell and muscle fibers constitutes one motor unit. The more fibers a nerve cell commands, the greater the force that motor unit exerts.

Most skeletal muscles have fast-twitch and slow-twitch fibers. Usually, both are pressed into service when you exercise. Slow-twitch fibers work best during low-intensity activities, which allow a good supply of oxygen. They get called on first for most activities and can keep acting for long periods. Fast-twitch fibers step into the breach to create bursts of power during high-intensity anaerobic activities. They supply more force, but are more quickly exhausted.

When nerve impulses originating in the brain shoot along neural pathways toward a muscle, they trigger a complex set of chemical reactions that cause muscle proteins called myofilaments to slide over each other, generating force. Movement occurs when that force ripples through the muscle structure to thetendons, which in turn tug on the bones. Essentially, the bunching muscles actlike strings that make a puppet spring to life.

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