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

[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...