Woman celebrating her sport achievements. Winning concept.

Motivational Tips for Getting Started to Get Fit

by with No Comment ExerciseFeatured

If you have diabetes or are at risk for developing the disease, deciding to commit to fitness could be a real lifesaver. That’s why it’s more important than ever to put yourself (and your health!) at the top of your list. If you aren’t sure where to begin or need a little support getting back on track, here are a few simple starting points from my brand new book Diabetes and Keeping Fit.

Check Your Blood Glucose

When you start a new exercise, checking your blood glucose before, during (if you’re active more than an hour), and after your workout pays off. A reading that changes — especially in the direction that you want it to — can be very rewarding and motivating. If you don’t check, you may never realize what a positive impact you can have on your diabetes simply by being active.

For example, say your blood glucose is a little high after you eat a meal, and you want it to go lower without taking (or releasing) any more insulin. You can exercise after your meal and bring your blood glucose down within two hours after eating and taking insulin, or you can avoid or lower post-meal spikes in your blood glucose.

Start with Easier Activities

Start slowly with easier activities and progress cautiously to working out harder. Exercising too hard right out of the gate is likely make you end up discouraged or injured, especially if you haven’t exercised in a while. If you often complain about being too tired to exercise, your lack of physical activity is likely what’s making you feel sluggish. After you begin doing even light or moderate activities, your energy levels rise along with your fitness, and your physical (and mental) health improves.

Pick Activities You Enjoy

Most adults need exercise to be fun, or they lose their motivation to do it over time. It’s human nature to avoid doing the things you really don’t like to do, so try to pick activities you truly enjoy, such as salsa dancing or golfing (as long as you walk and carry your own clubs). Having fun with your activities lets you more easily make them a permanent and integral part of your diabetes management. If you haven’t found any that you enjoy much yet, choose some new ones to take out for a test run (so to speak).

Spice It Up

An essential motivator involves mixing your workouts up with different activities. People commonly complain about exercise being boring. Feelings of boredom with your program can be the result of repeating the same exercises each day. To make it more exciting, try different physical activities for varying durations and at different intensities. Knowing that you don’t have to do the same workout day after day is motivating by itself.

Have a Plan B

Always have a backup plan that includes other activities you can do in case of inclement weather or other barriers to your planned exercise. For example, if a sudden snowstorm traps you at home on a day you planned to swim laps at the pool, be ready to walk on the treadmill or substitute some of resistance activities. You can always distract yourself during your second-choice exercise to make the time pass more pleasantly. Read a book or magazine, watch your favorite TV program, listen to music or a book on tape, or talk with a friend on the phone while you’re working out.

Get an Exercise Buddy (or Several)

You don’t need to go it alone when being active. Having a regular (and reliable) exercise buddy increases your likelihood of participating, and it also makes your activities more social and fun. Get your spouse, family members, friends, and co-workers to join in your physical activities, regardless of what time of day you do them. Having a good social network to support your new or renewed exercise habit helps you adhere to it over the long run.

Schedule It

Put your planned exercise down on your calendar or to-do list like you would other appointments. You show up for your doctor appointments, so why should scheduling your physical activity be any different? Never make the mistake of assuming it’ll happen just because you claim that you want to do it a certain number of days per week or month. It takes some planning ahead and the commitment to make it a priority.

Set Goals and Reward Yourself

Setting goals helps keep your interest up. For instance, if you walk for exercise, you may want to get a pedometer and set a goal of adding in 2,000 more steps each day. Break your larger goals into smaller, realistic stepping-stones (such as daily and weekly physical activity goals) for all your active lifestyle changes, and use SMART goals. Trackers, activity logs, and other motivational tools are also widely available online. Tip: Reward yourself when you reach your exercise goals (but preferably not with food).

Take Advantage of Opportunities for Spontaneous Physical Activity

You don’t have to do activities at a high intensity for them to be effective for diabetes and weight management. You can also add physical movement all day long doing anything you want to, including gardening, housework, and many other spontaneous physical activities. For instance, if you have a sedentary desk job take the stairs rather than the elevator whenever you can. Walk to someone else’s office or the neighbor’s house to deliver a message instead of relying on the phone or email. Or park your car at the far end of the parking lot and walk the extra distance. Guess what? You’ve just gotten yourself more active without giving it much thought.

Take Small Steps

If you get out of your normal activity routine and are having trouble getting restarted, simply take small steps in that direction. You may need to start back at a lower intensity by using lighter weights, less resistance, or a slower walking speed. Starting out slowly with small steps helps you avoid burnout, muscle soreness, and injury. Even doing only 5 to 10 minutes at a time (rather than 30 or more) is fine. After you’re up and moving, you may feel good enough to exceed the time you planned on doing in the first place. The key is to begin through any means possible.

 

About the Book: Diabetes and Keeping Fit For Dummies by Dr. Sheri R. Colberg offers all the guidance and step-by-step instruction you need to make exercise a priority in your diabetes management. This informative, down-to-earth guide shows you how to incorporate exercise into your routine, even if you haven’t been in a gym since high school. Get it online through www.amazon.com or www.dummies.com/store.html.

Diabetic woman preparing for a run

Tips on Glucose Management During and After Exercise
for Type 1s

by with No Comment CGMExerciseType 1

You may never have heard their names before, but they’re out there and they’re dominating in almost every sport: basketball, football, surfing, car racing, Olympic snowboarding, Taekwon-Do and even ballet. Sean Busby, Zippora Karz, Charlie Kimball and Missy Foy are just a few professional athletes living out their dreams and simultaneously living with type 1 diabetes.

Even though shooting for an Olympic medal is not the norm for most of us when we lace up our running shoes, the success of those who have can bring inspiration to people with diabetes who want to keep fit at any level.

A ton of research is being done in the field of glucose management during and after exercise, and we asked two top researchers who are also athletes living with type 1, to provide insights into their work and to share their personal training regimens.

Dr. Michael Riddell is a Professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science at York University in Canada and is considered the international authority on exercise and stress hormones and how they affect diabetes metabolism. He enjoys biking, hiking and trekking, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2013 with the World Diabetes Tour.

Dessi Zaharieva is a 3rd year PhD candidate in kinesiology and health science at York University. She earned a bronze medal in Taekwon-Do at the 2013 World Championships and is currently training and competing in mixed martial arts. Her research at York is aimed at improving diabetes management and blood sugar control during exercise in individuals with type 1.

TCOYD: Do you have any advice or tips for someone with type 1 who wants to take their training to the next level or take on a new fitness challenge?

Mike:

Unfortunately there are no magic bullets or magic solutions…what we’ve noticed is that training for an activity with type 1 requires a lot of vigilance around glucose monitoring along with a lot of trial and error.

 Dessi:

General guidelines are difficult because individual variability is so huge. For me, even if I were to do the exact same things today and tomorrow, the exact same training with the exact same adjustments to my sensor-augmented pump, I may not have the exact same response.

Also I have to take my pump off during training because I do mixed martial arts and I fight, so the changes I make to my pump might be very different than what Mike does when he’s cycling, because he doesn’t have to disconnect his pump.

TCOYD: Can you share some things that have worked for you personally with regard to managing glucose levels while working out?

Mike:

For the prolonged endurance exercise that I do that lasts an hour or so, I need to get my insulin down beforehand, so I try to find a time to do that activity when my insulin is already low, and the insulin I’ve taken after a meal is largely gone. This can be four hours after a meal or more, or it can mean exercising in the morning before I have breakfast. That really is the key to my success.

On top of that, I need to lower my basal insulin on my pump well in advance of an endurance activity, so an hour or 90 minutes beforehand, I need to get my basal down to about 20% of my usual basal rate. I also have my CGM on to make sure my blood sugar’s not getting too high.

I can usually get my basal rate down aggressively and then I can go for an hour – two hours even – with a very long run or a long bike ride. My performance improves if I can then start to have a little bit of carbohydrate from either a sport beverage or glucose gels, but I might need to turn my basal back up a little if I notice on my CGM that my glucose is beginning to rise because I’m snacking.

So for me, the secret is starting with low insulin in my body and then consuming carbohydrates for performance at the rate of around a half a gram of carb per kilo of body mass, so around 40 grams an hour or so.

Dessi

With my training there are a lot of similarities to Mike in that we both reduce our basal insulin quite drastically beforehand because I feel like without doing that, too much insulin in the circulation is not going to be a good thing with the amount of training I do. My training sessions are between one and three hours a night and sometimes even longer.

With that amount of exercise, reducing basal insulin becomes very important (or just having less insulin in the circulation if possible). That is one of the times when preplanning is essential. I don’t like to go fully fed into a training session. If I can wait four hours before I train that’s the best situation – to not have a lot of food or insulin in the body in order to try and prevent big spikes and drops in blood sugars.

TCOYD: How often are you checking your blood sugar during a workout?

Mike:

I’m vigilant about monitoring my glucose and constantly using CGM, and I wear my CGM on my watch. I don’t stop and poke my finger and do a blood test – I’m just looking at my outputs on my watch or on my pump, and I look frequently because I know my performance is best if my glucose is near normal or only slightly elevated. In American units I’m talking about 120, 130 milligrams per deciliter. That’s where I want to be, so I’ve got to look at my CGM all the time so I can continue to make changes. I can increase my basal rate if my glucose goes high or I can snack on carbohydrates if it drops below that narrow window of performance for me.

Dessi:

My pump is off when I train so it’s not as easy for me to check my CGM. I have the new Medtronic 630 G pump. I keep it in my bag really close to where I train, and anytime we get a water break I go look at my pump screen and it picks up a signal as long as I’m not too far away. So even if it’s not connected to me I still have an idea as to what’s happening.

TCOYD – Are there challenges in glucose management post exercise?

Dessi

It can be really challenging to maintain blood sugars throughout exercise AND in recovery. That’s one of the biggest challenges right now.

Mike

Some of the research we’re doing is focused on the glucose excursions and the meal after exercise, and if you have your pump off whether that makes glucose go higher. During exercise everything may be okay, but you may suffer a little bit in what to do for the meal after exercise if you’ve had your pump off, you’re hungry and you want to have a big meal, but your insulin might be low at that point.

Recovery is important because if you want to feel good and do it again the next day, you have to treat your body well in recovery. We’re still learning what the best approach is, what the right meal is, when to eat, how much insulin to give for any given meal, etc. You know you use a lot of calories and you burn a lot of carbohydrate when you exercise, and you’ve got to pay it back or you’re going to possibly set yourself up for hypoglycemia overnight. So these are all interesting research questions that we’re working on right now.

TCOYD: What are your thoughts on taking Afrezza if your numbers are high after a workout?

Mike:

We have Fiasp here in Canada. We don’t have Afrezza, but we know athletes who have taken Afrezza after seeing high blood sugar, and it disappears out of the system quite quickly which is nice, and then there’s no prolonged late onset hypoglycemia so I think it holds some promise.

Dessi

We know that if we can get the insulin in our system faster it’s going to help.

Mike

Get it in and get it out!

Dessi

I’m going to have spikes if I don’t take bolus insulin after exercise with my pump disconnected for so long and if that insulin is taking half an hour to actually start kicking in and working it’s already too late, so the Fiasp has been very helpful.

A few final thoughts:

People with type 1 diabetes can achieve basically any dream they have on the exercise front. They can be Olympians, marathon runners, rugby players, basketball players, etc, but each form of exercise has different energy needs and places different demands on their diabetes.

If you are embarking on a new goal or simply focusing on maintaining a current one, remember that it’s process of trial and error, try not to get discouraged, and what’s most important is that you do what works best for you and your body.

 

For more information on exercise with type 1, check out Dr. Riddell’s book:

Getting Pumped- An Insulin Pump Guide for Active Individuals with Type 1 Diabetes
available here.

For more information on their research at York University, please visit Dr. Riddell’s webpage here.  

mtc-novi18.jpg.392x286_q85_autocrop_crop-smart

Five Things You Should Know Before You Work Out

by with No Comment Exercise

You’re raring to go to go out there and get fit.

Ok, hold on there sunshine.  There are a few things you should know first.

The best exercise is the kind you’ll stick with, safely and happily week after week.

It’s January first again…or six weeks from your class reunion or two weeks before your oldest daughter’s wedding and you’ve decided to work out. Yay! Good for you. I’ll bet you can’t wait to get started. But hold on there sunshine. There’s a few things you ought to know before you lace up your sneakers and get going. Specifically, here are five things that will help keep you healthy, happy and safe as you exercise.

1. Get Cleared for Takeoff.

Have you been to your doctor lately? Have you seen her this month? How about this year? Maybe this decade? If you haven’t seen your doctor in a while, or don’t even have a doctor, you might want to think about starting here. Find a doctor, or see you doctor and make sure that you’re generally in good working order. Find out if there are any limitations on how much or what kind of exercise you can do.

2. EASY Does It.

It’s tempting, especially if just bought a slinky new dress or Speedo swimsuit to go a little crazy when you first start to exercise. How many times have you started an exercise program, done way too much, and then spent the next three days on the couch with heating pads, Ben Gay and aspirins? One exercise session won’t make you fit, no matter how intense. If you want the benefits of fitness, you need to do it consistently 3-5 times per week. And you can only exercise again if you didn’t get hurt during your last session. Not sure how much is too much? Hit the “Rock the Block” link in the tools section of the website.

3. Watch your dashboard indicators.

Most of us, treasure our cars. We wouldn’t think of ignoring a “check engine” light on the dashboard. We wouldn’t continue to try to drive on a flat tire. We wouldn’t drive blithely by with a loud thumping noise under the hood. But how many of us, ignore the signals our bodies give us as we’re trying to exercise? ). If you’ve ever stretched something too far, or popped something out of place, you’ve probably experienced either severe muscle tension or pain. This pain is the proverbial thumping noise under the hood. If you experience pain, you need to STOP, pull the car over and figure out what the heck is going on. Here are some warning signs you should never ignore as you work out.:

Warning Signs

  • Feeling of dizziness or lightheadedness
  • Feeling of tightness or pain in chest, trunk, back or jaw
  • Extreme breathlessness
  • Unusual fatigue
  • Nausea
  • Loss of muscle control
  • Allergic reactions—hives or rash
  • Blurred vision

4. Ramp Slowly and Steadily.

Once you’ve determined your starting point, it’s only natural for you to want to get stronger, faster and fitter than you are

now. But before you go ramping up your fitness efforts too quickly, too steeply or too often, it helps to remember the three basic parameters of any workout. These three parameters are duration, frequency and intensity. Duration is simply how long you work out. Is it ten minutes? 30 minutes? Two hours? Intensity is how hard you work out. Are you walking 2 miles an hour, 4 miles per hour or running 7 miles per hour? Are you strolling casually or sweating bullets? And frequency is how often you work out. Is it once a week, twice a week or every day? I use the acryonym DIF to remember these elements, because changing these elements makes a DIFFERENCE in your fitness level.

The key to ramping safely and successfully is to only increase one workout parameter per week and not more than ten percent. So if I increase my frequency from two workouts per week to three, I should not increase the intensity or duration of that workout. If I ramp from 1 mile per hour to 1.1 miles per hour next week, the frequency and durations of the workout should stay the same. Probably the easiest element for beginning exercisers to change is duration (or distance). For a handy chart to help increase duration by 10% per week, check out the 10 Percent Meter in the Tools section of TheFatChick.com.

5. Have Fun!

You are a lot more likely to stick with any exercise program if it’s fun. Explore what kinds of exercise you like to do. Be brave! Try something you never thought you’d do like Tango dancing lessons or surfing. Most people stick to exercise longer if there are other people involved. Find a group of people or a class that you enjoy and make some connections. Remember the best form of exercise is the kind you’ll do every week.

There are lots of other things you can learn that will make your exercise program more productive and more fun. You can find many of them at TheFatChick.com. But many of the best fitness lessons are learned while exercising. So check with your doctor, plan a short and easy workout, check in with your body and make sure that everything is okay, make a plan for getting just a little stronger every week, and then just go out there and have a great time!

This article shared with permission from thefatchick.com, where you can find even more great articles, tips, videos and expert motivation from Jeanette!

A senior black man takes a drink of water during his outdoor working

Finding Your Starting Point with the Rock the Block Exercise

by with No Comment ExerciseNew

Not sure where to get started with your exercise program? Use this tool to help you find your starting point!

The appropriate level at which to begin your exercise program is where you’re at.

If you have exercised recently (if inconsistently) it’s pretty easy to figure out where you should start with your workouts. Pick a recent workout that felt somewhat challenging but comfortable. Figure out how long and how hard you worked out. This is your starting point. But what if you haven’t worked out in a while (or ever)? How do you know where to start?

Testing the Waters. How do I figure out what my body can and can’t do. The answer is by testing your limits. But you need to test those limits in a safe and rational way. It’s probably not a good idea to test your skiing aptitude by being dropped out of a helicopter in the Alps. And you probably don’t want to test your swimming aptitude trying to escape the jaws of a great white shark on the barrier reef in Australia. You should test your aptitude in a safe environment where it is easy for you to quit at any time. You should begin in an environment where you can spend time quietly checking in with your body and monitoring for signs of pain or discomfort. You may need to start and stop a lot at first. You need to begin gently and move ahead slowly. Don’t forget to watch out for your dashboard indicators (body warning signs like feeling dizzy, light-headed, tightness in your chest, extreme breathlessness, unusual fatigue, nausea, loss of muscle control or blurred vision). Needless to say if you experience any of these, you need to STOP.

Exercise 1: Body Awareness.

Your first exercise, is 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 that it isn’t. The point of this exercise is not to see how far you can walk. The point of this exercise is to increase your awareness as you walk.

Get a bottle of water if it’s hot. Put on some comfortable clothes and nice comfortable shoes. Grab your cell phone—just in case. Before you start, write down the time here_______________.

Now go for a walk. Walk briskly but comfortably. Walk at a pace that you would take if you saw somebody really fascinating, like George Clooney on the other side of the room and he was getting away—I mean, leaving. As you walk, check in with how parts of your body are feeling. Note your breathing. Is it unchanged? Slightly deeper? Much deeper? Are you panting or significantly out of breath? If you are panting or significantly out of breath, this is one of your dashboard indicator lights 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 in your muscles? Do you feel pain? If you feel pain, please stop and find a place to sit down. If you feel much better after a rest, you may turn around and head very slowly back for home. However, if you still feel a lot of 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? How about your arms? Is your posture upright or hunched over? Do you feel any twinges anywhere? How do your feet feel as they hit the pavement? Try not to make any moral judgments about whether things are good or bad. Just open your senses and observe.

Whenever you finish and wherever you finish, right the time down here___________.

And the distance here__________________. (quarter-block, half block, 1 block, etc,).

When you are finished, 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 here_______________.

Now write in your journal about how your body felt during the entire exercise. If you do this exercise correctly you should have at least an entire page of observations about your body and your feelings. 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 here_________.

Every step forward, no matter how small gets you closer…

Checking in. How did it go? If you did the last exercise and found you needed to stop somewhere in the middle, then you have already found and written down your starting point. However, if you finished the last exercise, and were still raring to go, then you have a little ways to go in finding your starting point. This next exercise is for you!

Exercise 2: Rock the Block.

This exercise is exclusively for folks who finished exercise 8 and were still raring to go. Once again, find a nice flat block, grab a bottle of water and put on some nice comfortable shoes and clothes. Make sure you are wearing a watch and take note of your starting time. Also, take a look at your starting place for your walk. It might be the mailbox in front of your house, or the sign at the trailhead. This starting point is your home base. Start out walking away from home base around the block at a slow and steady pace. Swing your arms at your sides. Look up and be aware of your surroundings. Breathe deeply. Use the awareness skills you gained in exercise 8 to check in with your body. As you finish your rotation of the block and reach home base, check in carefully. How do you feel? Are you tired? Are you energized? Are you perspiring lightly or sweating like a sinner on Sunday? Are you breathing deeply or panting like a dog in heat? If you are sweating a lot or panting or experiencing any other exercise warning signs STOP. If you feel great, go ahead and go around the block again. Each time you pass home base check in with your body and see if you are ready to go around again. Continue until you are tired, or 40 minutes have passed—whichever comes first.

Now note your duration (how many minutes you’ve walked) here____________. And note your number of blocks completed here______________. This is your starting point for duration and distance. Please remember not to judge yourself, this is not a contest. This is not a moral imperative. It’s just information. And this information is an essential element in developing a fitness program that you can happily and safely enjoy for life.

Has the Block Been Rocked? The round robin exercise does a great deal to help you find your starting point. After this exercise, you should have a good idea of a starting duration and distance. The next step is to get a better sense of your exercise intensity. This is simply a way of describing how hard you are working as you exercise. Getting the right intensity level is critical to fitness success. If you work at an intensity level that’s too high, you risk injury and harm. You’re also more likely to quit. If you work at an intensity level that’s too low, you won’t receive as much fitness benefit from your exercise as you could. The next exercise will help you learn about fitness intensity.

Exercise 3: Managing Intensity.

Measuring your distance is one way of determining your intensity, but there is another important method called the Rate of Perceived Exertion or RPE. Now this is a fancy, ten dollar 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 at any given moment. The sweat scale is a continuum that ranges from 1 to 10. You can think of level 1 as sitting on the sofa eating cheesy poofs. You can think of level 10 as ready to have a heart attack–please call 911. Obviously, you don’t want your workout to be at either extreme of this scale. Level 1 is far too little to get any training benefits. And level 10 is likely to land you in a hospital. Imagine level 5 as being right in between these two marks. Ideally you’d like your workout to land at about a 7 or 8 on the scale. At this level you can easily speak in short sentences, but you couldn’t sing or recite a poem. You are breathing heavier than when at rest, but you are not short of breath or panting. At five, you feel like you are moving at a pace you could do for a long time. At level seven you’re not entirely sure how long you could go for, but you are not begging to stop either. 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?

Now translate that number into a number on the sweat scale and write that number here______. This was also your intensity. You can use this as a basis of comparison. At this point, you can make a commitment to stay at an intensity of 6-8 on the sweat scale. Now we’re going to repeat the body awareness exercise, and walk around the block again (or to the distance you achieved if it was less than a block). Now as you walk, practice speeding up and slowing down. Try to experience how walking at a 2 or 3 feels. Now gradually pick up the pace experiencing the 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, or you may get there by simply walking quickly. Whatever you do, don’t stay there too long. 15 or 30 seconds should be ample for you to get this feeling. And REMEMBER TO WATCH FOR YOUR DASHBOARD INDICATORS. If you are experiencing any of the warning signs, you need to slow down or stop! When you’re finished, pull out your journal and write your feelings in there.

All about frequency: TIn terms of evaluating your starting point, there’s one area we still need to calculate, and that is your frequency. Simply put, your frequency is how often you work out i.e. once per week or three times a week, etc. If you are already working out more than three times per week, great! That number is your frequency. If you haven’t been working out, then let’s aim for three times per week for now, okay? 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. If you want to aim for more days per week, that’s fine. But I strongly recommend that you start out at three days per week, experience success, and then bump your frequency up. In any case, I’d also like for you to have at least two rest days per week. This allows your muscles a chance to rest and rebuild as you ramp up your fitness efforts.

Exercise Four: Finding Frequency.

So based on your current exercise levels and the recommendations listed above, select your weekly frequency here: (circle one)

I will work out 3 4 5 times per week, every week. Okay, now that you’ve picked how many times per week you’ll work out, you need to think about how you will work this number into your schedule. Think about your week and think about your life. What days will work best for you? Is it Monday, Wednesday and Friday Mornings? Is it Friday Night, Sunday Morning and Wednesday afternoon? It doesn’t matter which days you will work out, just so long as the rest days and workout days are distributed relatively evenly throughout the week. Just pick a schedule that works for you and stick to it. Circle your Exercise Schedule:S M Tu W Th F Sa

Okay, so What’s the Plan? So with all this discussion of what you shouldn’t do to get fit you’re probably wondering, “So what DO I do to get fit? Was there a plan in there somewhere? Did I miss it?” No, you didn’t miss it. And believe it or not we had to go through ALL of that other evaluation stuff before we could be ready to formulate the plan. And now that we’ve done all that evaluation stuff (you DID do it right?) the plan is very simple. Review all the evaluation exercises you’ve done so far in this chapter. Now collect all the information and fill in the blanks.

Your Exercise Game Plan Duration: (copy from exercise 1 or 2)__________.

Intensity: Review Exercise 3. Pick between 6 and 8 on the sweat scale: _________. Or
Distance: Review Exercise 2. Write your distance here_____________.

Frequency: Copy from Exercise 4:_____________.
And
Schedule: Copy from exercise 4: S M Tu W Th F Sa

So one more time, let’s establish your personal plan:
I will exercise for ___________ minutes at a ____ on the sweat scale (or for _______blocks/laps/miles) _______x per week on the following days:_____________.

That’s it!  That’s your beginning plan.  Congratulations!  Now get going!

This article shared with permission from thefatchick.com, where you can find even more great articles, tips, videos and expert motivation from Jeanette!