Make Your Hard Hard and Your Easy Easy
You do not have to work out hard every single day to be fit and healthy. In fact, working out too hard too often is a recipe for injury, fatigue, illness, burnout, global warming and world hunger. That’s the exact opposite of what you want to achieve when you are busting your butt, right?
Alternating Hard days with Easy days will help you achieve your fitness goals without overly straining your body. This is good news, people.
What’s Hard?
What’s hard for one person is not necessarily hard for the next person. Determining what is what is all about perceived exertion, or how hard it feels to you.
The key to a Hard workout is that it is impossible to talk. Or on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being sedentary and 10 being “I am being chased by a man-eating lion and literally cannot go any faster or harder than I am” a Hard workout should be about a 9-10.
This type of workout should only be done once or twice a week, with three days of easy workouts (and a day of complete rest) in between.
For me, a Hard workout is sprinting, most of Level 3 of the 30 Day Shred and the Plyometrics workout of P90X. (One day I did one hour of Plyometrics followed by 45 minutes or running with my daughter. I thought I was going to need hospitalization. It was a dumb, dumb thing, never to be repeated again.)
What’s Easy?
Again, thinking “perceived exertion,” an easy workout is one where you can comfortably carry on a conversation with someone during the entire workout. On a scale of 1 to 10, Easy is maybe 3-5.
For me, that’s brisk walking or maybe up to Level 3 on my elliptical.
You should do 3 Easy workouts between each Hard workout. Or 2 Easy workouts between each Moderate workout.
Say what?
I'll explain that tomorrow.
What’s Moderate?
A Moderate workout is one where you can speak in words, but not sentences. You can talk, but don’t want to talk. On a scale of 1-10, Moderate is 5-8.
For me, that’s most weight-training, advanced yoga and alternating jogging with walking.
You should do 2 or 3 moderate workouts a week, separated by 2 easy workouts.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One of the biggest mistakes people make in exercise is that they make their Hard days too easy and their Easy days too hard (because they feel guilty for doing anything easy), resulting in a whole string of back-to-back Moderate workouts. This type of schedule will put too much strain on your body over the course of time, resulting in all the bad stuff we mentioned at the beginning of this post.
I personally, find this information incredibly freeing. The fact that I don’t have to kill myself every single day makes me want to do a happy dance. Which would be an Easy workout for me.
Tomorrow, I will put all of this together for you, and show you some simple ways to structure your workouts so you achieve maximum fitness with minimum bad stuff.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Leaving in a bit for a 3 - 4 mile run. I like to do "fartleks" (a Swedish term) which are like intervals while running...speeding up for a bit then back to a comfortable pace. The exertion level on the faster running is at a level 9 - 10 then back to a 6 - 7 exertion level.
ReplyDeleteI figure my power walking is around a 4 - 5 as I can carry on a conversation.
I am amazed when I walk with friends who do not work out other than walking and I feel like their pace is a "stroll."
Love this, Sandy. I'm with you about the moderate--weight lifting is my favorite thing to do (although you'd never know it to look at me). Running? That's HARD! Melanie, I bow to your athletic prowess, girl.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this! Getting ready for my "easy" (ha!) 30 minute toning session!
ReplyDelete