It’s still January. Are you on track with your goal of getting fit in 2015? If it isn’t one of your goals, stick it on your list now. Being fit will increase your chance of celebrating many new years to come.
How Quickly Can You Improve Your Fitness?
Before answering that question, we have to accept two proven assumptions:
1. The body can only improve at a certain rate.
2. You can only exercise for a given amount of time without significantly increasing your risk for injury.
Let’s look at the first one. Your fitness level can improve about 50% per week sequentially, based on the training, or how much exertion, you put on your body. That means that if you increase your training load, (whether that load is adding five miles per week to your running, or lifting an additional 20 pounds of weight per strength training session, etc.), your body will improve and adjust to the new load at the rate of:
50% the first week
25% the second week (50% of 50%)
12.5% the third week (50% of 25%)
6.25% the fourth week (50% of 12.5%)
To show it another way, it would look like this:
Week one – 50%
Week two – 75%
Week three – 87.5%
Week four – 94%
So after four weeks of training using your new routine, your body has improved 94%. To further improve your fitness, you would have to increase to a new load, and start again from your last stopping point.
Now let’s look at the second one. You can only exercise for a given amount of time. Regardless of your current fitness, your body is conditioned at a certain level. If you try to push your body harder than you should, you increase your risk of injury. Plus, add to that the fact that your body only has so much energy it can burn at any given time.
Based on these two facts, you can’t expect to go from being a couch potato to running 5 miles in one day. It’s just not going to happen.
However, if you begin by walking 30 minutes the first day and then start a progressive walk/run exercise routine where you strive to gradually walk less and run more, you could, over the course of a month, reach your goal of running 5 miles.
The other fact worth noting is that different parts of the body develop at different rates. Your heart and skeletal muscles respond more quickly to exercise than do your bones. If you have been doing cardio training by biking, your heart and large lower muscle groups may be ready to run, but your leg bones may not be. This would increase your risk of a stress fracture due to the pounding of running. So to take up running, you have to start slowly and build from there, but you have to actually include running.
Remember that when trying to improve your fitness level, you have to listen to your body. It will tell you if you are trying to progress too quickly. Listen and adjust, or be prepared to suffer the consequences!
Now get started! If you haven’t already, sign up for the 5 day “Are You Fit or Unfit?” ecourse. Then keep your eyes open for the 4 Week Fitness Plan…..coming soon.
Every day…..Say NO To Stroke!
