Exercise update

[amul]

Yesterday, I ran 1.33 miles in 30 minutes on the treadmill (settings: 3.0 mph, incline 5, "forest trail" routine). Today, I'm going to the Sivenda Yoga center (finally) and will be doing 90 minutes of yoga, possibly followed by 30 minutes on the stair-stepper.

I want to really focus on endurance conditioning, but I'm not sure if the stair-stepper is a good "alternate" for the treadmill. I know you're supposed to alternate muscle groups.

Later today, I plan to write out all the things that I want to do with my day and/or week, and try to see if there are actually enough hours in the day to do everything, even assuming that I was disciplined enough to do them.

And I really need to find time for a proper blog entry about my current emotional state.

Comments

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Depends what you need improvement on, partially.

Both hit the hamstrings pretty hard, and the quads. If those are areas where you're improving quickly, you probably want your "alternate" routine not to hit them primarily.

I usually try to alternate upper body with lower body, but it's been awhile since I've needed to care -- my current routine is only hitting the gym twice a week, so I don't need to alternate.

[amul.livejournal.com]

As I just posted, I was foolish to think that I could manage a 90-minute yoga routine AND a bit of cardio in the same day. Thanks for the input, though. It's been a really long time since I was serious about exercise, and it is extremely nice to have input from anyone besides my health-obsessed brother.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Sounds good. I don't know what you're doing yoga-wise, though I'm going to guess it hits a lot of your core muscles (abs, back, maybe hips and chest), which is going to make it hard to alternate. Yoga is simply going to hit a fair number of the same muscles, hard, as almost anything else you could do except perhaps on-a-machine weightlifting targeting your arms and legs. It's hard to avoid using your core muscles, hard, with almost any more free-form exercise.

On the plus side, the yoga's probably really good exercise if you're doing it right :-)

Cardio is often easier to alternate because it's usually either mostly-upper-body (rowing, push-ups, upper-abdominal crunches) or mostly-lower-body (running, stairmaster, elliptical).

[amul.livejournal.com]

Crunches and pushups count as cardio? They don't strike me as very aerobic.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I'm biased -- I was part of a boot camp program (exercise program, not military) that tended to do a lot of alternating crunches with pushups and running, and thus used them as cardio.

By themselves, crunches or push-ups with breaks in between wouldn't be cardio, it's true. But if you run during the "breaks", or just alternate, between push-ups and crunches so that you never really get a break, it'll keep your heart rate up nicely. You just have to do it for around a half-hour...