How Do You Know When to Increase Your Exercise?

Source : saganmorrow.com

I’ve been doing fitness classes at GoodLife Fitness for the past few months, and I am totally in love with it!

For the past couple years, I’ve been struggling with committing to exercise. I’ll run for a few weeks, or do yoga a couple times each week for a few months, or I’ll pick up weights and pump out a dozen reps every now and then, but actually doing exercise for a sustained period of time wasn’t really happening.

Even when it came to winter exercise, I was having fun with skating and skiing, but I wasn’t doing them every day or multiple times each week on a regular basis. The only thing that I’ve always done is walking, partly because walking is my form of transportation, and partly because walking is my form of therapy

What it has really come down to for the past couple years, was, I kind of lost my way when it came to fitness. I was restless and wasn’t doing any one type of exercise because it just wasn’t the right fit.

And then one day I went to a Combat class again, which I hadn’t done in probably a year, and I fell in love with exercise all over again.

I started with going to fitness classes on Mondays (Combat), Wednesdays (Pump), and Fridays (Attack). The first week, I was pretty sore. But by the second week I was already getting into the rhythm.

And I wanted to add more.

I think it was after about a month that I added in another class and started exercising four days each week. That lasted a solid three weeks or so before I decided to add a fifth class, which is where I’m at now.

(Of course, some weeks things might come up that I can’t rearrange, so I end up doing a four-day fitness week instead—which is still awesome!).

This whole experience of starting essentially from scratch and working my way up to five days of fitness classes each week has led me to think a lot about the question of how do you know when it’s time to increase the intensity and / or frequency of exercise?

I think it comes down to be honest with yourself about a few things:

1) Do you want to increase the intensity / frequency of exercise? Is the idea appealing to you or does it exhaust you?

2) Are you having fun with your workout and enjoying it? Find an exercise you LOVE and can sustain for the long-term! For me, it’s fitness classes—for you, it could be running, swimming, weight lifting, etc., or even a combination of a few kinds of workouts.

3) What’s realistic for your current lifestyle and your physical ability? Challenge yourself, but don’t hurt yourself! Check in with your body regularly.

If you’re already doing high-intensity exercise (such as GoodLife Fitness classes!), it might be better to increase the frequency, such as adding more classes, rather than trying to increase your intensity within those classes.

For myself, I remind myself each week that I don’t have to do all of the advanced moves if I’m too tired. I can always do low-impact if I need to. And you know what? By reminding myself of that, I always feel fantastic after exercising, even if I choose to stick with a lower set of weights in Pump, or if I choose to do the less intense moves in Attack or Step class.

What exercise do you love? How do YOU know when it’s time to increase the intensity / frequency of exercise?