Working Out - A Weekly Minimum

Part Trois
(See also Part I: Waking Up and Part II: Turning Point)

A Supplementary Element to Weight Loss
Had you challenged me to lose 20 pounds in January, I would have immediately pictured myself spending hours and hours exercising at the gym.

That much extra time - maybe 1 or 2 hours per day - would have seemed doable in the short-run if I made it a high priority, but in the long-run, when I have less flexibility in my schedule (school is a flexible, self-motivated kind of busy), allocating that much time to exercising consistently over the years seems much less sustainable or desirable.

Fortunately, I've since learned that exercise need not be the main driving force behind weight loss. With my change in diet alone, I had enough of a daily caloric deficit to be able to lose weight without exercising much at all.

That said, regular exercise can provide a ton of health benefits, and even if it wasn't the main driving force of my weight loss, it certainly helped to burn calories, tone muscles, brighten my mood, strengthen my bones, strengthen my heart and lungs, and increase my energy levels.

A Minimum
Thus far, aside from food choice and portion control, I have solidified only one part of my long-term physical fitness goal - exercising a minimum of three times per week for the rest of my life.

I love that goal. It has proven enough to provide all of the above-mentioned benefits, and it has also proven to be fairly easy to accomplish as long as I get out to the gym at least by Tuesday.

I could certainly do more. I could get into better shape by adding all sorts of cross training, weight training, and core/leg/upper body exercises to my current routine.

But I find great comfort in knowing that I've found a reasonable, minimum workout schedule that provides all sorts of health benefits and that I can realistically hold myself to for the rest of my life. That's sustainable, healthy living.

Current Routine
The length of time, intensity level, and type of exercise I do are elements of my routine that will remain flexible. So what you see here is subject to change. But this is what I've been doing for the last three months:

• Time: 30 minutes
  
• Intensity level: I push myself to go a little faster each week.
• Type of exercise: I run on the treadmill (occasionally outside, where I tend to run further and longer, but where it's blazing hot and uncomfortably humid)
• Other: I do at least 60 push ups using the Perfect Pushup every other day at home, I do a minimum of 35 pull ups at the gym after running, and I try to stretch and do 100 sit ups each day. None of these three additions to my routine take very much time at all, they're all doable even when I don't have access to a gym (pull ups can take some looking around, but most parks have some sort of bar you can use), and they cover some of the major muscle groups without requiring a lot of extra time and commitment.
  

Over time, I intend to add a wider variety of exercises that I can rotate through to touch more of my muscle groups. But I don't plan to change or increase the minimum amount of time I spend exercising, and I do plan to develop a solid minimum goal for the off-day exercises mentioned above so that I never find myself focusing solely on aerobic exercise to the exclusion of all muscle toning.

In conclusion, it's all about the sustainable minimum. It provides a doable plan for when, where, and what I'm going to do for a workout and leaves me free to just focus on "the burn."