- If you’re new to exercise or you haven’t worked out in a while, it’s important to take the time to find a healthy and safe place to begin.
- Learn how to increase your body awareness, determine your optimal exercise intensity, and find the right exercise duration and frequency that fits your fitness level and lifestyle.
- Exercise has many benefits for type 2 diabetes and blood sugar management.
Reading Time: 6 minutes
If you’re ready to increase your physical activity but you aren’t sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place! Fitness instructor and body-positive activist Jeanette DePatie will walk you through a few simple steps to set you on a path to success.
How to Find Your Exercise Starting Point
The appropriate level at which to begin an exercise program is right where you currently are. But if you haven’t worked out in a while – or ever – how do you figure out what your body can and can’t do? You start by testing the waters.
You need to test the waters in a safe way where you can quit at any time, and where you can monitor your body for signs of discomfort. You should begin gently, move ahead slowly, and watch for your body’s dashboard indicators (warning signs like dizziness, tightness in your chest, extreme breathlessness, unusual fatigue, nausea, loss of muscle control, or blurred vision). If you experience any of these, you need to STOP.
Exercise 1: Increase Your Body Awareness
Your first exercise is to find a nice flat block with sidewalks and walk around the block for as far as you feel comfortable.
Some of you won’t complete the whole block. That is perfectly okay. For some of you this exercise will seem hopelessly remedial. I assure you it isn’t. The point is not to see how far you can walk. The point is to increase your awareness as you walk.
Put on comfortable clothes and shoes. Get a bottle of water if it’s hot. Grab your cell phone, a notepad, and a pen. Before you start, write down the time.
Start walking briskly but comfortably. As you walk, check in with how parts of your body are feeling. Note your breathing. Is it unchanged? Slightly deeper? Are you out of breath? If you are panting or significantly out of breath, this is one of your dashboard indicators and you should slow down or stop until you can catch your breath again.
Check in with your muscles. How do your legs feel? Are you feeling nothing at all? Do you feel slight tension or moderate tension? Do you feel pain? If you feel pain, stop and find a place to sit down. If you feel better after a rest, you may turn around and head slowly back home. However, if you still feel pain, use that cell phone to call somebody to pick you up. There is nothing to be ashamed about. This is simply where you are, and we all need to start somewhere.
Check in with your other muscles. How does your back feel? Your arms? Your feet? Try not to make any judgments about whether things are good or bad. Just open your senses and observe.
Whenever and wherever you finish, write the time down, along with the distance (half block, one block, etc,). Sit quietly and breathe deeply. Allow your body to come to the same state it was in before you began. Once you feel that your breathing and heart rate are back to normal, write the time down.
Write down how your body felt during the entire exercise. Success in this exercise depends on the richness of your observations. If you did less than a block, that’s fine. You have found your starting point. Pick a point in your walk that is just before where you experienced pain or were significantly out of breath. This is your activity target. Write your activity target in your journal.
If you finished walking the full block and were still raring to go, you have not yet found your starting point. The next exercise is for you!
Exercise 2: Rock the Block
This exercise is exclusively for folks who finished exercise 1 and wanted to keep going.
Take note of your starting time and start walking around the block at a slow and steady pace. Be aware of your surroundings. Breathe deeply. Use the awareness skills you gained in exercise 1 to check in with your body.
As you finish your rotation of the block, check in. How do you feel? Are you tired? Are you energized? If you are sweating a lot, panting, or experiencing any other warning signs, STOP.
If you feel great, go around the block again. Each time you pass home base check in with your body and see if you are ready to go again. Continue until you are tired or 40 minutes have passed—whichever comes first.
Note in your journal how many minutes you walked and the number of blocks completed. This is your starting point for duration and distance.
Exercise 3: How to Determine and Manage Exercise Intensity
The Sweat Scale!
There is a method of determining intensity called the Rate of Perceived Exertion or RPE. This is a fancy word for what I call the Sweat Scale. You can think of the Sweat Scale as monitoring your body to measure the intensity of your effort.
The Sweat Scale ranges from 1 to 10. Think of level 1 as sitting on the sofa eating cheesy poofs. Think of level 10 as about ready to have a heart attack. Obviously, you don’t want your workout to be at either extreme. Ideally, you’d like your workout to land at about a 7 or 8.
At this level you can easily speak in short sentences, but you can’t sing or recite a poem. So go back into exercise 2. Do you remember all of those observations you wrote down about how you felt? How was your breathing? How long did you feel you could go on?
Translate that number into a number on the Sweat Scale and write that number in your journal. This was also your intensity. You can use this as a basis of comparison for the next step.
Now we’re going to repeat the body awareness exercise and walk around the block again (or to the distance you achieved). As you walk, practice speeding up and slowing down. Try to experience how walking at a 2 or 3 feels. Gradually pick up the pace experiencing levels 4-8. What does a 4 feel like? How is it different from an 8? Try bumping it up to a 9. You may need to jog or run to experience this feeling. Whatever you do, don’t stay there too long. 15 or 30 seconds should be ample for you to get this feeling.
When you’re finished, pull out your journal and write about how it felt.
REMEMBER TO WATCH FOR YOUR DASHBOARD INDICATORS.
If you are experiencing any of the warning signs, slow down or stop!
Exercise 4: Finding Your Frequency
There’s one more area to calculate, and that is your exercise frequency. If you haven’t been working out, let’s aim for three times per week for now. This allows you to have a rest day or even two between each workout, yet is frequent enough to help you maintain your training effects.
Think about how you will work this number into your schedule. It doesn’t matter which days you work out, just so long as the rest days and workout days are distributed relatively evenly throughout the week. Pick a schedule that works for you and stick to it.
Putting Your Personalized Exercise Plan in Place
Believe it or not, we had to go through ALL of that evaluation stuff before we could be ready to formulate an exercise plan. But now that we’ve done it, the plan is very simple. Review the evaluation exercises, collect the information, and fill in the blanks below in your journal:
- My Exercise Duration (time/distance, copy from exercise 1 or 2): _____
- My Exercise Intensity (review exercise 3 and choose your number from the sweat scale): _____
- My Exercise Frequency (copy from exercise 4): _____
- My Exercise Schedule (choose your days to exercise): _____
Now we can establish your personal plan:
I will exercise for _____ minutes at a _____ number on the sweat scale (or for _____ blocks/laps/miles) _____ times per week on the following days: _____.
That’s it! That’s your beginning game plan.
Walking is an excellent way to get more movement into your life, but you can also explore online fitness videos and learn about endurance activities if interested.
The Takeaway
The Rock the Block exercises above were created to help you gather information regarding your appropriate exercise starting point. Remember to take things at a pace that’s right for you, and please consult with your doctor before starting any exercise program.
Congratulations on taking this first step! Now go out there and rock the block! 💪 🎉
I loved this article… but I’m no expert on the topic.
Thanks Mike – we appreciate all your expertise and research in exercising with type 1!