How My Hair Stylist finds time for Cuts and Every Day Exercise
Nov 13th, 2008 by Rowena French
Today I went to a new hair stylist. As you know, there is always a lot of social chitchat when you are having your hair cut and colored. This was no exception with my new friend Amy, who like me is passionate about every day exercise.
We have both recently decided to lose weight through starting a new healthy diet and a more consistent exercise program. We have been working at this for roughly the same time and were interested in ‘what worked’ for each other.
Amy is overweight and she needs to lose around 20 pounds. As a mom with two teenage kids she has a busy schedule. She says that her first goal was to set and maintain a regular every day exercise routine.
Amy’s days start early and finish late. She is so determined to improve her body and her health however, that she has fitted her every day exercise program around her work. She says that the kick that losing weight gives her is really worth organizing daily work outs in her full schedule.
Amy convinced me of the importance of using portable monitors to gauge my heart rate the calories I burn. This will be additional information to the distance I walk recorded on my pedometer. My new heart monitor will be especially helpful as it will inform me of the level of cardiac fitness in my work outs.
If your heart rate is around 70 beats per minute you need to exercise so that you maintain consistently a heart rate of somewhere between 90 and 100 beats per minute. Maintaining an elevated heart rate improves your overall fitness and contributes not only to cardiovascular efficiency but also helps you to lose weight. Amy and I agree that increasing our heart rate is an important goal in our every day exercise.
The other thing I learned from Amy was how important social support is in her program. She exercises with a girlfriend and they keep each other motivated. They have (non-eating) rewards for reaching goals that are part of their every day exercise and they have enlisted friends and family as their ’support group’ to enquire about their progress and encourage them to continue.
A final aspect of Amy’s success story this morning was how she keeps regular records of all aspects of her progress. She measures the diminishing size of her body as well as her decreasing weight. She finds that when one aspect of her progress slows another is likely to improve and this keeps her happy to continue with her every day exercise.
To make sure that these records are all consistent, she measures and weighs at the same time of the day and with enough time between each measurement to allow time to make progress. Even when one aspect of her progress plateaus, another will improve. She has the ways to accurately monitor her losses all worked out!
So now, like busy Amy, I am using different instruments to objectively monitor the impact of my exercise. I regularly chart of all aspects of my progress, include suitable rewards for each goal I reach and I have others in my life who my encourage my every day exercise while I move towards a healthier body and happier life.
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