Lifestyle Choices

Endurance enhances your ability to keep going under stress, whether jogging or walking briskly, without getting uncomfortably out of breath or tiring too quickly; it also helps protect you from heart disease. Body fat steadily decreases over the course pf an intensive aerobic exercise programme — not only because you’re burning calories but also because, for reasons that are not entirely understood, the desire to eat foods high in saturated fats and cholesterol declines.

The best activities for increasing stamina require a bit more energy than you may be accustomed to. Such exercise will make you slightly out of breath: that’s just the point, to increase the heart rate and the flow of oxygen (hence ‘aerobic’, which combines the Greek words for air and life). In order to obtain the maximum benefit from aerobic exercise, you need to keep up the momentum for at least twenty minutes, though thirty to forty minutes will enhance its effectiveness even more.

Suppleness is all about being able to stretch, bend, twist and turn through a full range of motion. You need this ability all the time — for tying your shoes, reaching a high shelf, even getting into and out of cars. If you’re supple, you’re less likely to get injured from falls or a new strenuous exercise, or to lose your balance. Flexibility is sometimes the forgotten factor in fitness. Exercises that increase suppleness ensure that a variety of joints and muscles are put into action, thereby keeping them in healthy condition and contributing to faster reflex reactions. Afterwards, the muscles are better able to be tensed and stretched, which is a helpful first step towards inducing a state of physical relaxation.

Strength is the ability to exert a directed force for pushing, pulling or lifting. You need some strength nearly every waking moment — to move around, to carry objects, to climb stairs, even to sit up straight. Gradually building muscular strength protects you from strains and sprains. Strengthening the large groups of muscles in the back and stomach will give you a more erect posture, as well. Weight resistance training leads to the best improvements in muscular strength and function. It’s possible for the average woman to increase her strength by up to 40 per cent in this way, even though the female body is not as efficient biochemically at producing muscle mass as the male body is.

Like nutrition, exercise should be balanced to meet the needs of the individual, taking into account the wide physical variation among people, for exercise can be as much a source of stress as its release. However, a bit of stress can be a good thing for people who have led a sedentary life: it induces alertness, a feeling of excitement, faster reaction speeds, heightened acuity and, perhaps most important of all, a feeling of accomplishment when a goal has been attained. A safe amount of physical stress ‘inoculates’ the body and mind against stress in the future. A similar process minimizes, over time, the objective and subjective levels of difficulty experienced during exercise; the person becomes better able to cope with progressively more difficult programmes. Regular stress release can be as healthy and invigorating as laughter or a good night’s sleep.

The life of a couch potato is an easy one, and it can be addictive, but in the long term it leads to serious health problems. Sedentary people are far more susceptible to the adverse accumulation of weight due to their greater sensitivity to the effects of dietary fats. Physical inactivity carries with it a number of proven risks; in general, it means that you will be three times more likely to be in poor health. On the other hand, if a mature person makes a resolution in mid-life and undertakes an intensive exercise programme, it’s important that he doesn’t overdo it, particularly in the beginning. Vigorous, high-intensity exercising, especially for the uninitiated, is likely to produce some unwanted physical side-effects, and may drive them back to couch-potatohood — just as a crash diet can sometimes be worse than the bad diet it replaced.

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