While total fitness may sound like a huge commitment require hours and hours of exercise time, it's really not. What it is really about is balance. Not the balance beam kind of balance, but more the balanced nutrition kind of balance. It means doing a variety of different exercise that have different goals in mind. Instead of just focusing on muscle mass, orcardio, or flexibility, total fitness means devoting a little time to each of these categories. While chances are that a single focused workout will have components of all these categories, the single focused work out really only focuses heavily on one thing. Total fitness workouts however are great for preparing you physically and mentally for participating in a wider range of sports and physical activities.
Total Fitness Road Map
It's not complicated to modify your current workout to transform it into a total fitness workout. All you need to do, is find a little balance. The easiest way to do this, is to focus on one component of your total fitness workout each time you exercise. If you exercise say three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday), as many do, you could do a strength workout on Monday, a cardio workout on Wednesday, and a flexibility workout on Friday. Of course if you workout more than 3 days a week, then you can just alternate each day with a different type of workout. Alternating workout types, allows muscles you use for one type of workout to recover while you work a new group of muscles with a different workout type.
A Little Heavy Breathing
When many people think of cardio workouts, they often thing of aerobics classes. While that is certainly a great workout, there are plenty of others as well. Many sports such as swimming, soccer, basketball, and squash are great forcardio . As well they can make exercising fun, and provide social interaction particularly with sports that are team based. If you prefer the structured class approach, there are a great variety of classes available these days, such as spinning and step exercise programs. Check with your local fitness club, to see what they offer.
Mountains Of Muscle
Whether you goal is to look like a champion body builder, or simply get stronger, your going to be lifting weights of some kind. Good fitness clubs should have a variety of lifting andresistance machines to build muscle mass and make you stronger. Often, they will have an introductory session for members who are unfamiliar with the machines. Doing weight training the right way, is safer for you, and will get you good results faster. So, if your not sure about how it works, be sure to ask.
Stretching Things Out
This is the one are that is often neglected by many. As you get older, this is probably one of the most important things you can do though. Good flexibility gives you the ability to do a wider variety of other physical activities, as well it helps reduce injuries when participating in sports. Yoga and Pilates are two excellent ways to achieve this component of your total fitness workout.
Achieving total fitness, is not really that hard, and like anything else, it gets easier with practice. The nice thing about each of these components, is that they compliment each other. The more flexible you get, the easier it gets to become stronger. The stronger you get, the easier it is to run that extra mile. Time to get started.
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