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Planning Your Fitness Program is Important

10th May, 2008 - Posted by healthy - No Comments

Planning your fitness program is a big step, but a very important one. If you are serious about wanting your exercise routine to succeed, you need to have a game plan in place before you start. If you aren’t prepared, it can be difficult to maintain an exercise schedule.

The key things to remember when you’re planning a fitness program are what you want to accomplish and how much time you can devote to it each day or week. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so, even though you can set a few short-term goals, pay more attention to the long-term results that you want.

Tailor a fitness program to your work schedule and your environment, too. You need to be able to set aside guaranteed times every week to do your fitness program. Even if it is only a few minutes a day, or spread throughout the day, every little bit helps! You won’t see the results that you want if you can’t make the time each week to exercise.

A gym membership may or may not be helpful to you. They can be great, but, if you don’t have time to devote to them, you may want to skip it. There are other options. For instance, you could get some home exercise equipment. If you don’t have time or money for that, you could take short walks a few times a week. You could ride a bike, rather than driving, if you have a short commute to work. You could use stairs, even if an elevator is available. The possibilities are endless and will depend on your weekly routines.

No matter why you are trying to start a fitness program, it’s important to keep track of your progress. Try keeping a journal and recording when you exercise, what you did and what results you saw. You can also slowly lengthen your routines. For instance, if you lift weights, you can increase the weight or the number of repetitions you do, after a while. You could also swim more laps in a pool or try to swim the same number of laps faster. The same goes for walking, jogging, biking and so on.

Don’t focus on short-term too much, when planning your fitness routine. You shouldn’t get discouraged if you have what you consider to be a bad day or a bad week. Just remember, any fitness program can be a good one if you keep at it. Even small changes can make a big difference over time. So, plan a fitness routine and stick with it!