Officially, my goals were,..something I don’t quite remember. Probably greater muscular endurance, higher cardiovascular fitness, and greater flexibility. (While I did – and still do – want to increase my muscular strength, I wasn‘t planning on lifting weights semi» daily.) In reality, I didn’t have any goals except to pass the class, When I began doing the weekly workouts, I was intimidated by how long, without stopping, they had to be. Upwards of ten minutes! I’ve bicycled for an hour or more before, but keeping up a jog or exercise bike “ride” for an extended period of time seemed a terrible fate to resign myself to three-to-four times weekly. It’s one thing when I’m out in a mysterious forest, another when I’ve locked myself in the house so that I can have easy access to a timer with which to track my BPM and not worry my mother. How boring and exhausting. But the wonders of television, more often than not, saved the day as I paced around some hot shows or music channels.
As for my exhaustion, I discovered that strange point in an exercise in which you can feel wiped out, yet spurned to go faster and press on. I feel that my resting heart rate has stayed fairly level throughout – somewhere between 68 bpm and 74 bpm. Therefore, I colcude that my cardiovascular fitness, while it didn’t get mttch better, luckily didn’t get worse I haven’t stretched as often throughout my exercises as I could have, and I’ve noticed no changes in my flexibility, at least. I conclude that my flexibility hasn’t changed greatly, either. However, I do think that my muscular endurance has increased; I’ve found it easier and easier to exercise for long periods of time, Part of this is related to decreasing the intensity of the workouts at times and picking up speed at others, but another is my body adapting to the length, or the time, of each session, Increasing the frequency from three sessions per week to four has also helped augment my muscular endurance.
Also, I managed to reach my target heart zone (or hean rate) at some point during, I believe, every exercise, so that’s good Actually, a nice justification for my choosing ‘jogging‘ as my main exercise would’ve been because through that, I could implement the principle of specificity to improve strength and endurance in my leg, thus making it easier for me to walk to school (which I do). …But I haven’t felt any major difference in my walking speed or endurance as a result of my exercises. I don‘t have a good way of testing for any changes in my body composition over the course of the class…not that I’d measured it before. I simply don’t have the resources for it. I don’t have skin calipers or a huge tub of water, (To tell the truth, my mother helped me esLimate, not accurately measure, my weight for the class. I couldn’t even find a scale anywhere in the gym!) I planned, mainly, to just jog the exercise sessions away at first.
The only thing that changes about this was the addition of an exercise bike to my mother’s room a few weeks into the class. I didn’t refer back to my Physical Activity Plan at all — in fact, until this rubric mentioned it, I’d forgotten it even existed! But I suppose that it helped me get started with my fitness plan. If I hadn’t laid out how I was going to exercise before I started, what was I gonna do? I took my heart rate before and directly after each exercise by using an online timer and checking my pulse for thirty seconds. I also made sure to record the time of each exercise, then use another website to estimate how many calories I’d burned. The results from the FITNESSGRAM assessment also, in a way, helped me self— monitor my fitness…hut in reality, I think they just reminded me of how low I rated on my middle school fitness exams; I still couldn’t do many crunches, stretch that far, or run a mile in good time.
But hey…that’s alright. I tried, and I think I’m making some progress. The frequency of my exercises jumped from three times a week to four in the last two or three weeks of this class ,. not a big change, really, but it’s there. I became better able to increase my intensity as the days went by; as I became used to jogging for long periods of time, I could speed up for longer periods, too. The time increased from ten minutes to about 3/4 of an hour, and it’s this factor that helped my muscular endurance increase the most. I used all three principles in tandem to implement a fourth sort of principle: that of progression. The exercises progressively became more difficult, but as a result I became more able, more “up to the challenge” of more frequent exerciser Through that in turn, I was able to apply the exercising principle of overload to rnyjourney I expect it to obviously be something I can practice for a lifetime and that I enjoy.
Hopefully, I’ll always have these nice legs, and that way I can walk and bike often and occasionally jog. I like walking around and seeing the sights. It should help me relieve stress as well. A look at my fitness logs over time should show that my resting heart rate fluctuated slightly and within the same small number range »- meaning that my resting heart rate, for the most part, did not improve. The more drastic changes back and forth in my exercising heart rate show that the intensity of the end of each of my workouts changed from day to day. Was I supposed to be keeping track of what I ate? Well – I mean » was I supposed to be writing it down? My diet at home hasn’t changed much over the course of the semester, However, due to personal and familial circumstances involving my divorced mother landing a hot date and taking me along for the ride, I did eat out four or five times to restaurants like the Outback Steakhouse.
And, yes, I did eat some Chik—fileA once, and I did just get some lame nuggets, lame waffle fries and lame sugar-drinks Quite lame choices, However, whenever I went to a restaurant, I made sure to order vegetables — for instance, once I had a stew with spinach on the side, another time a sweet potato with steamed broccoli. While not all of my choices are so healthy, I’m now making a greater effort to choose healthy foods when going out. Don’t feel the need to buy a lot of equipment. The only reason my mom has an exercise bike is that someone who wasn’t using it gaev it to her, but even without it she’s free to walk and jog around the home or block to get some ‘cise in, and so am I.
While jogging isn’t going to solve all of your fitness-achieving problems, it can make an effective jumping—off point if you don’t know where to start from, and it may even serve as the core of your exercise regimen, whatever it may be You can’t always rely on the heart rate monitor of the aforementioned exercise bikes, either, Depending on whichever one of the twelve virtual “bike routes’I you choose, the heart rate displayed may jump to clearly-untrue heights. Plus, for my mom’s model, you have to keep your hands on the handles (at all times, to be safe) in order to make sure that the bicycle actually senses and records it. Sometimes you just have to put your fingers on your veins and time it.
