ACHIEVING YOUR FITNESS GOALS
An important step in developing a long term fitness program is to determine your goals. Is your primary goal for exercising on your Vision Fitness Treadmill to lose weight? Improve muscle tone? Relieve stress? Prepare for the spring racing schedule? Knowing what your goals are will help you develop a more successful exercise program. Below is a list of some common exercise goals:
•Weight Loss
•Weight Maintenance
•Improve Body Shape and Tone
•Strengthen Leg Muscles
•Increased Energy Level
•Improved Sleep Patterns
•Improved Sports Performance
•Improved Cardiovascular Endurance
•Stress Reduction
If possible try to define your personal goal in precise, measurable terms, and then put your goal in writing. The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to track your progress. If your goals are long term, divide them up into monthly, then weekly segments. Longer term goals can lose some of the immediate motivating benefits.
Short term goals are easier to achieve. Your Vision Fitness Treadmill console provides you with several readouts that can be used to record your progress. You can track Distance, Calories or Time. Time is the most important and useful of these functions.
Sample Goals:
Goal setting is a popular motivational technique. It’s important to set goals and reward yourself when initiating a new exercise program because you’re attempting to break current patterns and form a new habit. Whether you use this technique or another, make fitness a priority in your life. You can achieve the ultimate reward to yourself
-you can establish the exercise habit! Some sample goals may be:
•To strengthen my heart by exercising 24 minutes three days a week. (Goal Measurement: Exercise Time = 72 minutes a week.)
•To improve my body’s ability to burn fat by exercising at a low intensity for 48 minutes per day, 5 days a week. (Goal Measurement: Exercise Time = 240 minutes per week.)
•To burn off work related stress by exercising for 20 minutes a day on work days. (Goal Measurement: Exercise Time = 100 minutes per week.)
Keeping an Exercise Dairy
Photocopy the weekly and annual log sheets on the following pages to make your
personal exercise log book. As time goes by you’ll be able to look back with pride at the work you’ve done. As your fitness improves, you can look back and see how far you’ve come.
Developing a Fitness Program PART 5 | 35 |