MAKING FAMILY FITNESS FUN!
You are not alone if your family gets fit on their own time. In today’s fast paced world of non-stop meetings, soccer practices, grocery shopping, music lessons and the many other activities families enjoy, it can be very challenging finding time to get fit together.
As more and more after work and school time is being spent watching television, playing video games or surfing the internet, it has become increasingly more important to make fitness a family priority.
Not only will increased family fitness time help your health, but it will provide some quality time for family members to communicate and share experiences.
So whether it is something as simple as walking the family pet after dinner or washing the car on a Saturday afternoon, remember to make it a family affair.
Here are some ideas that might help you get started:
GETTING TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Whether you are just getting started on the road to fitness health or are an experienced athlete, it’s important to know your heart rate.
Heart rate is widely accepted as a good method for measuring intensity during running, walking, swimming, cycling, and other aerobic activities. Exercise that doesn’t raise your heart rate to a certain level and keep it there for 20 minutes won’t contribute significantly to cardiovascular fitness.
The heart rate you should maintain is called your target heart rate. There are several ways of arriving at this figure. One of the simplest is: maximum heart rate (220 - age) x 70%. Thus, the target heart rate for a 40 year-old would be 126.
Some methods for figuring the target rate take individual differences into consideration. Here is one of them:
Resting heart rate should be determined by taking your pulse after sitting quietly for five minutes. When checking heart rate during a workout, take your pulse within five seconds after interrupting exercise because it starts to go down once you stop moving. Count pulse for 10 seconds and multiply by six to get the per-minute rate.
source: www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4736
Heart Rate Monitors
Heart rate monitors are serious fitness-training tools that have trickled down from the athletic elite to the exercising public. More and more amateur exercisers are using heart-rate monitors to gauge the intensity of their workouts. Experts agree that manually taking your pulse during exercise is extremely unreliable, and your perception of how hard you're working out is almost invariably wrong. A heart-rate monitor is the only way to construct a truly scientific workout regimen based on your heart rate.
The simplest heart-rate monitors do one thing: Measure your heart rate. The most advanced can download data to your PC, record your workout information in a program that analyzes your heart-rate data, and design custom workouts based on your performance.
Here are some links for additional information on rate monitors:
Polar: www.polarusa.com
CardioSport: www.cardiosport.com
Timex: www.timex.com
Acumen: www.acumeninc.com
Garmin: www.garmin.com
