HOW OFTEN TO TRAIN? HOW HARD? AND HOW LONG? by Norbert D’souza

How often to workout depends on what your goals and objectives are! Most experts agree that 3-5 times per week is sufficient. You should exercise for the duration of 20-60 minutes at 50- 85% of you’re heart rate. However, the frequency of your workouts will depend on your fitness level and your schedule. Beginners should start with about 3 non-consecutive days of cardio and work their way up to more frequent sessions.

THE GENERAL GUIDELINES ARE:

To maintain current fitness level: 2-4 days a week (at least 20 minutes) and to lose weight: 4 or more days a week (at least 30 minutes) If you can’t do the work required to reach your goals, you have two choices: Change your schedule or lifestyle to accommodate your goal, or Change your goal. Once you’ve used to exercise you can start increasing your intensity. So how hard should you work? That depends on how long you have to exercise. If you workout for a longer period, keep intensity low so you won’t wear yourself out. In shorter workouts, raise the intensity since you’re working out for a shorter period of time. Also, you can vary the intensity of some workouts with interval training to burn more calories. Remember How hard you work is a crucial factor in your workout because how hard you work is directly related to how many calories you burn

How do I know when I’m exercising hard enough to burn fat? This is perhaps the most common question raised by individuals exercising for the purpose of either weight loss or simply weight control. This stems from the recognition that aerobic exercise is significant for any weight loss program, that is diet plus aerobic exercise produces more weight loss than diet alone. Actually, you’re always burning fat at one rate or another, but you burn most when your body is in its aerobic range. A good rule of thumb is that after 20 minutes in your aerobic zone, you will be burning more fat than carbohydrates. You actually start burning fat after only twelve minutes of aerobic exercise. If you can increase your aerobic activity to 30 minutes or longer, you will be burning a larger percentage of calories from fat. The object is to burn more calories than you take in. Further exercise can be grouped into three broad levels of intensity, mild, moderate, and high. Mild intensity is a comfortable walking pace and can be sustained almost indefinitely, moderate intensity is equal to an average cardiovascular conditioning workout (able to talk easily,) and can be sustained for  2 – 3 hours, and high intensity is not able to talk and can only be sustained for 30 – 45 minutes. Finally, any exercise is going to help.  However, You need to get your heart rate up to a certain rate (depends on age) and maintain it there for at least 20 minutes to get minimal fat burn.  Of course, there should be also the consideration of dropping your calorie intake so that your body burns fat.  Also, do some toning exercises.  Muscle helps burn fat.