How to Start Exercising With Little Experience
Let’s start this off by saying that if you aren’t regularly exercising throughout the week, you should be.
There are significant mental and physical health benefits to regularly exercising that not only improve your quality of life, but also reduce your chances of dying from numerous diseases. If you’d like to read more into this, I encourage you to check out our blog “Be Hard to Kill” for a more in-depth review of such benefits.
For some people, regularly exercising is something they’ve done their entire life and a routine they find enjoyable. Unfortunately, others may find exercising to be a significant challenge. Some of the experiences I’ve had with such people are that they’re intimidated by exercising, they don’t know where to start, they don’t know what good or bad forms of exercising are, they’ve never done it before, etc.
My recommendation to anyone who finds themselves in this position is almost always the same, just start walking!
Walking is the most widely available and easiest form of exercise there is and there is a ton of evidence that supports its effectiveness on our health. Typically, starting with just 20-30 minutes of walking per day will suffice. Tracking steps can also help with improving your physical activity level, with a goal of reaching 10,000 steps a day. This does not have to be done all at once, rather can be broken up into a sum for an entire day.
A few easy ways to increase your steps or daily walking duration could be taking the stairs rather than using the elevator, parking further away from your destination, utilizing standing/ walking breaks throughout your day at work, or getting a dog!
The reason I encourage people to start with walking is because it’s the most basic form of exercise. For some, just walking 20 minutes can be very challenging. But just like a runner can gradually progress intensity and volume overtime, so can someone who chooses to walk. Setting time aside each day to get your steps in can also help with establishing a routine. Once you get into a routine, it becomes easier to make moving your body a priority.
The nice thing about walking being so basic though, is that it can become boring and easy once you’ve done it enough. By this time, walking may not be as stimulating of an exercise, and you’ll begin to look for alternate forms of exercise that feel more challenging such as running, weight training, interval training, yoga, etc.
If walking becomes too easy and you’re still unsure about how to progress your exercising, a great idea would be to hire a personal trainer or start attending classes where workouts are already programmed for you and a coach/ trainer can help you learn new movements!
If you’re someone who struggles with exercising due to pain, that’s where we come in!
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