Many people have asked me in the past when is the best time of day to exercise. I should say first thing in the morning, once you’ve done it you have the rest of the day to do what you want without that guilty feeling of ‘oh I haven’t done it yet ‘ which is one of my own issues, but moreover, the reality is we don’t all have the luxury of being able to choose what time of day to exercise, what I would say is it’s never a good idea to do the same exercises every day, Cardio, Weights & Resistance on different days keeps you interested and your body on its toes, it’s a known fact that some days we are just sluggish, on those days don’t push it ( the reasons vary from not enough energy giving food the day before to menstruation, to depleted vitamins , lack of carbohydrate intake or just your own biorhythms) all of this we will talk about in later posts but for now don’t beat yourself up over it and even take the day off and try again the next day.

It’s important to note that the type of exercise you do has to be relevant to your goals eg : weight loss, overall fitness etc… If you have more than 10lbs or 8 kilos to lose you should always stick to a fat burning exercise regime for at least the first six weeks .

The magic rule is 45 minutes of CONTINUOUS exercise per day is all we ever need, this does not include your 15 minute warm up at the beginning or your 15 minute warm down after your exercise. By 45 minutes continuous we mean exercise without stopping whether it be running, swimming, cycling, aerobics, circuits, basically any cardio vascular workout, weight training or resistance training workout. Training for hours does nothing but wear out our joints & cartridges to name two and you will get bored very quickly with not seeing any results. There is also a reason for this too, there are three levels of exercise :

fat burning where your heart rate remains at a constant level ( I will post a chart that shows the 3 different levels of exercise) Over this number of beats per minute takes you into the next level of aerobic exercising.

Aerobic exercising, this pushes your heart rate up quickly, over this heart rate

Will push you into Anaerobic exercising.

Anaerobic exercise where the heart rate stays fairly high but you will build muscle

a 45 minute workout will push your heart rate to its limit so in the early days you need to learn to pace your self in order to complete the 45 minutes, I would go so far to say you need to build up to the 45 minutes by doing 1 minute without stopping , then 5 minutes without stopping and so on and so for as you feel comfortable, you should never push yourself to feel dizzy, nausea or anything like this .

Yoga Can be an aerobic exercise in a class but doing it at home to your own pace can be fat burning, it raises the heart rate but it also allows time to recover , catch your breath etc before moving on to the next pose, yoga helps your deportment and stretches your skeletal & muscular frame without fear of injury, it also clears your mind.