Remember how every time a new year comes, you make a new year resolution saying that you'll take better care of your health and start going to the gym? You become super motivated and pumped in the first month, but you gradually lose interest in it and keep on making excuses to skip the gym. Now it's time to change that.
Speaking from personal experience, the biggest hurdle in working out is not the exercise itself but rather the commitment and discipline. Unfortunately, no one can help you in this department other than yourself. If working out seems too much for you to handle, you can shift your mindset to break down the entire routine into smaller chunks: getting ready, showing up at the gym, and doing the workout program. Once you got through the first two, congratulations, you're halfway there. All you have to do next is exercising on your own or with your coach's guidance.
In a casual chit-chat with Mario, the owner, and trainer at Infinite Fit Camp, we talked about maintaining health through fitness.
According to him, there is a bare minimum amount of workout that you need to do, which is measured by minutes per week. For high-intensity exercise, you need to achieve 75 minutes per week, whereas, for medium and low-intensity exercise, it's 100 minutes per week. What it means is that it is the amount of time you need to exercise in a week. Let's say you'd like to do high-intensity exercises, and you want to split them into 5 different sessions. You can do 5 days a week and 15 minutes for each session. Doesn't seem so hard when you put it that way, no? You can even do it at home, and you're free to do whatever exercise you want, as long as you keep your body active according to the intensity level of your choice.
Baca Juga : Things You Need to Know About Home Exercise |
However, working out alone won't be sufficient to achieve better health. You need to eat and rest well too. "In fitness, there are 3 things that you need to take into account: exercise, diet, and rest. Think of it this way. We 'damage' our body when we work out, we fill our broken muscles with the nutrition that we consume, and then we rest to let our muscles regenerate. Rinse and repeat. That's how we grow stronger slowly and steadily over time," he explained.
In another personal experience, I tried hitting the gym before with my friends from college. But our schedules no longer align as time passes by. Some of us are determined to keep going on, while the others decided to quit instead. Those who kept going on ran into a problem where we had no idea what to do in the gym, and there were no trainers to help us out.
If you have ever been into that situation and can't (or refuse to) afford a trainer to guide you, maybe you can try going to gyms that provide group training programs. Currently, some fitness centers are trying to adapt that kind of training program to encourage people to exercise more.
As mentioned before, doing the exercise is only half the battle. The other half is to show up even if you don't make the most out of it. In Mario's words, "Bad exercise is better than no exercise at all." Hopefully, you and I can stop making excuses and start committing to the discipline.
