Throughout your week, you should ideally be doing a range of strength, aerobic, balance and flexibility activities for overall good general fitness, including Pilates of course!
Aerobic activities are activities that will make your heart beat faster and your breathing harder. This includes cardio activities such as walking upstairs, running, swimming, dancing, playing tennis etc. These exercises will keep your heart and lungs healthy, reduce risk of stroke, help you walk for longer distances, as well as making you feel more energised.
Balance challenging exercises improve your balance to help to keep you steady on your feet and reduce the chances of a fall. It is recommended to do balance challenging exercises at least twice a week.
Flexibility exercises improve and maintain movements across your joints. Exercises like yoga, Pilates or Tai Chi are very effective. Doing balance exercises will create better posture, reduce aches and pains, lower your risk of injury and can help to continue carrying out every-day tasks. Incorporate some of these activities at least weekly to feel the benefits.
Strength exercises are essential for adding in to your regular activities. Strength exercises are any exercises or activity that challenges and builds muscle. This can include resistance training, yoga, Pilates, heavy gardening, hill walking, swimming, cycling or dance. By aiming to continually make these exercises a bit harder, it will help to improve your daily life.
Ultimately, your goal should be to decrease the time spent being sedentary, limiting being inactive (sitting down, watching TV, on the computer) to eight hours or less per day.
How much time should you spend doing these activities?
Aim for 20-30 minutes a day (or 150 minutes spread throughout the week) of moderate activity. This can be split into 10-minute blocks or done all at once.
What is ‘moderate activity’?
When you are doing moderate activity, you should feel warmer and begin to feel puffed. Your heart rate should increase to the point where you can still talk but will run out of breath after a few words. Once you are comfortable with this, or if you want to work harder, you can do vigorous activity. This means your heat rate is increased even more and you will be puffing quite hard. When doing this type of activity, you can spend less time for the same benefits; but remember you must be working harder!
*Always check with your health care professional before doing any exercise, or ask Lisa, our principal instructor, who is completing an Exercise Science degree, for clever ideas on how you can incorporate aerobic activity in your daily life, and guidance on how to stretch and strengthen safely.
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