Getting The Right Amount Of Exercise

Implementing Physical Activity Guidelines

The Week That Was

Fasting is more popular with readers than I thought it would be, and it was great to hear your personal experiences about what has and hasn’t worked for you.

Most people who responded had followed the 16-8 fast, confining eating to an eight-hour window from between 10 am-12 pm to 6 pm-8 pm.

I don’t know if I could make it through to bedtime if I ate my last meal at 6 pm, but I learned how it could be a good option with younger children going to bed earlier and then you’re up early in the morning. 

The other fascinating insight was that multiple people who have been fasting long term found it took much longer than 10-14 days for the hunger patterns to reset, with timeframes from three to six weeks. 

That’s longer than I’ve seen in my experience working with clients who have tried fasting, but it’s great to know.

Thanks for the feedback, and I appreciate the insights into your experiences. It’s always good to hear different perspectives on how different strategies have gone upon implementation.

My training this week has been steady and unremarkable. It’s very humid, which makes even early morning cardio sessions just a bit more challenging, but the increased perspiration makes it look like I’ve worked hard.

This week’s article is all about training and helping to ensure you’re doing enough of it, so let’s get straight into it. 

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A Guide to Getting the Right Amount of Exercise

Four primary training variables must be considered when developing a program: frequency, intensity, time (duration) and type of exercise (FITT).

They each interact with each other during individual sessions and across the week.

The duration will typically decrease as intensity increases, but there may be scope to increase frequency.

The more types of exercise you do, the higher frequency that can be tolerated because different body parts are being taxed. Training the lower body six days a week is likely to overload it, but if you split six sessions into upper and lower (or push and pull), you can still go to the gym six days per week if you want to.