We can do it! Wednesdays: new exercise goal

The goal I’m going to focus on for the month of April is to exercise more often. I used to achieve this goal without a sweat (pun intended) in college when I could go to the gym early in the morning and get my daily workout over with before my day got crazy. But now I need to be to work by 7 each morning, which means waking up at 5:30. So if I wanted to work out before work, I’d have to wake up at 4:30. I actually did try this for a few weeks, but 4:30am pushed the limits of what this self-proclaimed morning person could handle (I think it’s because it’s too close to being in the “really late at night” zone for my body to consider it morning). Anyway, since that experiment didn’t work, I have to deal with going to the gym after work, and by 5pm my mind has had a lot of time to come up with excuses and rationalizations for not working out. So long story short, while I do go to the gym fairly often (about 3 times per week), it’s still not as often as I would like and as is probably ideal for my body.

Since the internet people don’t really agree on what the ideal amount of exercise should be, I decided to go with the CDC recommendations for two somewhat arbitrary reasons 1) the CDC is funded by the government, which is funded in part by me, which kind of makes me a sponsor of their advice and 2) their recommendations are more than what I’m doing now, but not outside of the bounds of what I think I could reasonably do each week. I got the following info straight from this CDC webpage.

The CDC is kind of funny because they have two levels they provide guidelines for: amount needed “for important health benefits” and amount needed “for even greater health benefits.” Since I’m super competitive I scrolled right past that lame “for important health benefits” garbage right to the activity levels for the few people willing to work towards the elusive “even greater health benefits.”

The CDC site gives three options to get these even greater benefits:

1	5 hours each week of moderate intensity activity AND muscle strengthening activities that  work out the whole body at least 2 days per week
2	2.5 hours each week of vigorous intensity activity AND muscle strengthening activities that  work out the whole body at least 2 days per week
3	An equivalent mix of moderate and vigorous intensity activity AND muscle strengthening activities that  work out the whole body at least 2 days per week

Okay, so at this point I had more questions than answers and was a little ashamed to be a distant sponsor of this guideline. But the site isn’t so bad and most of my questions were answered after scrolling down a little bit on the webpage. My main question was about the difference between moderate and vigorous intensity activity and the answer is: A LOT. So according to the CDC, moderate activity is lame stuff that I wouldn’t even consider to be working out like walking, biking on level ground, and pushing a lawn mower. (Now to be fair, this might not be considered “lame stuff” for those who are new to exercise, but I’ve been at it for years, so I need a little more). Vigorous activity is stuff that actually gets your heart rate going like running, biking up hills, and pretty much any type of cardio workout you would do at the gym. Since I don’t want to worry about tracking my moderate intensity activities all of the time, I’ve decided to go with goal #2 from the table above. Now that I have my goal, I’ll be working towards it for the month of April and will provide my first round of updates next week.

I'll end this with a picture of me doing some physical activity in Zion:

See you tomorrow!