Fitness Exercises: Get On Track to a Healthy Life

Preventing diseases, losing some pounds for a lean body, building more muscles for strength and toning important body areas for a better physique with an aesthetic quality to mention but a few, are some of the reasons that might make you want to start on the right fitness training exercise program. Everyone sets his or her own fitness exercise goals depending on how they want to benefit from the fitness exercises. Different types of exercises are suitable to people of all ages from kids to the elderly, for different health and physical fitness needs and benefits.

Some forms of fitness exercises are very light and may not need use of any exercise equipments while others are quite engaging and require a great deal of time and other resources to achieve targeted objectives. Before you start on some forms of exercises, it is always advisable to get examined by a doctor or seek the opinion of a physical therapist for you to be declared fit or otherwise. This is especially so if you have chest problems or have been diagnosed with other serious health conditions before. It may also depend on the type of exercises you intent to perform.

Fitness exercise programs  can be planned in many ways but the best start with simple light exercises to prepare your body muscle groups for the harder or more challenging exercises. Flexibility exercises are the best for beginners to start with as they prepare their different muscle groups which have not yet been subjected to more vigorous exercise activities. In this category stretching exercises targeting all your major muscle groups are very important. Many people underrate them not knowing that they help stretch muscles at full range and that skipping them to start straightaway with more straining exercises can cause serious muscle injuries. These exercises are very essential and must be performed throughout your entire fitness training exercise program.

After about a week or two, other types of fitness exercises can be included in the program with different priorities depending on what your goals are. For those targeting to achieve weight loss, aerobics would follow in the program while for those interested in building their muscles, strength exercises would be given much priority while aerobics would still be accommodated. In each case, flexibility exercises would still continue especially between the major training sessions or during the breaks. The reason is that stretching exercises target to stretch any muscle groups used before or strained during previous exercises. Aerobics or cardiovascular exercises are more physical exercises that improve the body’s oxygen system by supplying more blood to all your body muscles. They increase your body metabolic rate and in the process burn excess fats. They include any physical activity which leads to heavy breathing or sweating like running or even walking. At gyms, aerobics or cardio exercises are performed to music and in groups led by professional fitness instructors. Strength exercises mainly involve weight lifting while targeting all the body muscles groups. Priority is first given to the major muscle groups like chest, shoulders, abs, back and hamstrings then later focusing on smaller muscle groups to avoid imbalances which can potentially lead to poor body shape or injury.

All fitness exercises should be performed in a very balanced manner in order to avoid serious injuries to body muscles. Flexibility exercises such as stretches and yoga exercises should be accommodated throughout in order to relieve stress that builds gradually on muscles especially during body building exercises. Evenly distributed, 3 to 4 exercise free days except for only mild stretches should be allowed every week in order to allow muscles to recover. Cardiovascular or cardio exercises are still essential to all. For instance, you may not benefit from strength fitness exercises indented to tone up your body for a better physique, if you still have some fats accumulated around your abs. You will have to burn those fats with cardiovascular exercises if you don’t want to make things even worse by building muscles over the fats. Some people have been told that they can use ab machines to shape up but the truth is that you can’t achieve that without aerobics. In other words, burning fats for weight loss should be evenly distributed in your entire body but not just around your stomach.

In any fitness training exercise program, discipline, consistency and patience are very important for any goals to be achieved. Also remember that proper diet and nutrition as you go on exercising is very important. If not sure how to manage everything on your own, you better hire a fitness instructor to get things on the right track for you. If you find the cost too high, just buy an exercise DVD and will be good to go. Don’t worry incase you don’t have all the exercise equipments for your home gym; you can first start off with flexibility exercises that may need only a few equipments or none. You can then gradually over time buy more exercise equipments starting with the most important ones like treadmills, dumbbells, barbells, resistance bands, inversion tables, elliptical machines and so on, that can be used for different workouts. For now, I think you have enough to digest in the meantime. Start applying it and definitely will realize your goals if you stay focused.