Key 2: Get Fit, Fast, Strong, and Flexible
Key Points:
1. Being active can do wonders for your health. Try to incorporate the 4 F’s weekly: Fit, Force, Fast, and Flex.
2. Fit means building our endurance and making our cardiovascular system work by running, cycling, etc..
3. Force means working our muscles to get stronger via resistance training with weights or our body-weight.
4. Fast means incorporating quick movements, generally in the form of interval training.
5. Flex means stretching our muscles, which ideally we can incorporate daily as a form of relaxation.
“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
Physical activity can dramatically improve your health and performance. If you want to live a world-class life, you’ll need an exercise plan. In particular, you’ll want an approach that capitalizes on what I call the 4Fs: Fit, Force, Fast, and Flex.
Fit: By “Fit,” I mean cardiovascular endurance. I want your heart, lungs, blood, and circulatory vessels to be healthy and high functioning. Each time you walk, jog, run, swim, or bike, and you sustain that exercise for longer than 20 minutes, you trigger a number of positive adaptations in the body.
Your heart muscles get stronger and the chambers in your heart increase in size so they can pump more blood. You get more alveoli (microscopic air sacs where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged between the air and the lungs). Cardiovascular exercise also increases the number of capillaries in your muscles and organs.
Try doing some sort of cardiovascular aerobic endurance—an activity that raises your heart rate and makes you sweat—three times a week. People usually think of running, but there are lots of options: Go for a walk. Go for a bike ride. Get out on a paddle board. It doesn’t matter. Just raise your heart rate and sweat.
Force: It is so important that you train your muscles to create more force, which helps you be stronger. When you do strength training (otherwise known as resistance training), you are engaging a different energy system and muscle fibres than you use when you’re doing cardiovascular endurance training. As long as you maintain a reasonable intensity, strength training will require the kind of force that is generated by your type II muscle fibres (your speed and strength muscle fibres) and your anaerobic energy system (the twin engines that get involved when you sprint, jump, or do heavy lifting).
Do some sort of strength training twice a week. This is especially important as we age for maintaining our bone and muscle mass.
Fast: “Fast” simply means moving quickly, and interval training (alternating going fast with going easier like you do in a spin class or when you lift some weights then rest between sets) is a great way to make that happen. Interval training can improve both your endurance capacity (aerobic energy system and type I muscles) and your strength capacity (anaerobic energy systems and type II muscles). When you do that, you teach your body how to process metabolic waste more efficiently, which improves your overall fitness and increases your ability to recover on the fly.
Once in a while, skip your strength training and do something fast instead - an all-out activity that builds up the lactic acid in your muscles and causes that burning sensation. You can do it any way you want. Just slide in a spin class or sprint session when you would normally lift weights, and then knock yourself out.
Flexible: I’d like you to spend some time each week (ideally a little bit every afternoon or evening) stretching. Stretching calms you down by activating your parasympathetic nervous system (the recovery and regeneration system). Even if you have had a brutal day, coming home and doing 20 minutes of stretching or yoga makes a huge difference.
Finally, the bonus and most important “F” of fitness is to make sure you’re doing something that’s Fun! If you don’t enjoy your exercise, it’s going to be that much harder to stick with it. A couple modules ago, we challenged you to brainstorm activities that you like. Look back at that list and make sure you’re incorporating one or two of those activities into your weekly exercise routine.
That’s it. Other than that, I suggest taking one day a week off to recover and regenerate. Even world-class athletes take a break once a week. Use the 4Fs to optimize your health and performance so you feel great all the time.
Today’s Words of Wisdom: Alex Hutchinson on the power of exercising with a group
Alex Hutchinson is an author, scientist, and journalist who writes for Outside magazine, Running World, and The Globe and Mail. Alex has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge and competed as a middle- and long-distance runner for the Canadian national team.
“One area that I find most interesting is the literature in evolutionary anthropology on social bonding, the origins of collective behaviour, and how and why we work together. One of the classic examples is a study conducted with the rowing team at Oxford. We know that pain tolerance increases from endorphins released during exercise. So they compared the increase when rowers trained on their own versus what happened when they trained with the entire team. The increase in pain tolerance was about twice as big when the group trained together. There was something about performing the task in the presence of teammates that produced a bigger change in brain chemistry.”
Today’s Call to Action: Craft your Weekly Fitness Plan
By now you have discovered which activities you enjoy and which you might not like as much. Hopefully you’ve tried out some of these activities as well!
The key to maintaining a physically active lifestyle is to stick with what you like and to make it part of your routine. For the next two weeks, craft a workout schedule that is realistic and one that you will enjoy doing. For example, if you’re very busy, don’t schedule a workout for every day of the week. Maybe with your schedule it’s only realistic to do a 15-minute walk some days, but on weekends you have time to do a workout class or go for a family hike. Put this activity in your calendar. If you make a weekly schedule and write it down you are much more likely to stick to it.
Use the 4 Fs of Fitness Checklist, also located on pages 33-35 of the Rest, Refocus, Recharge Workbook to help you plan out your week.
Good luck and have fun!
Today’s Bonus Video
Click Here for a bonus podcast with strength coach Casey Zavaleta on the importance of resting and recharging. Also, check out this video Here of Dr. Eli Puterman discussing the benefits of exercise at the level of the cell all the way up to the level of our psychological health.
The information and advice provided in this program is intended to assist you with improving your performance, as well as your general health. It is not intended and should not be used in place of advice from your own physician or for treatment or diagnosis of any specific health issue. By participating in this program you acknowledge that undertaking any new health, diet and/or exercise regime involves certain inherent risks, that you assume such risks, and that you release Wells Performance Inc. from any responsibility or claim relating to such participation.