How To be fit

Everyone agrees that fitness is
good. It boosts your health,
brightens your soul, calms your
mind, and allows you to do more
with your life.

How can we go from flab to fit, or
from fit to ultra-fit?
Most people who set out to
exercise fail miserably. Because
it’s hard to motivate yourself when
you feel the discomfort – or even
pain – of pushing the boundary of
your fitness.

Here’s what can keep you
motivated: join a group that
shares an aspiration for better
fitness. In this post I propose that
we conduct a group challenge in
order to lift our fitness markedly
within 2 months. Are you keen?

How’s your fitness?

Imagine 10 stages of fitness. Stage
1 means lying flat in bed with no
strength at all. Stage 2 is where
you get seriously tired just walking
a short stretch on the flat. Stages
5 to 7 means you’re medium – to
cracking- fit. And Stages 8 to 10
mean that you are ultra-fit. So
where are you at?

Remember that it doesn’t how your
body is right now -  as long as you
work towards more fitness.

Elements for fit body

* Warm Up

A warm-up could be an easy walk
outside or on a treadmill, or a slow
pace on a stationary bike. For the
cardiovascular portion, walk or
pedal faster, do step aerobics with
a video, or jump rope -- whatever
you enjoy that gets your heart rate
up.
The resistance portion can be as
simple as squats, push-ups and
abdominal crunches. Or you could
work with small dumbbells, a
weight bar, bands or tubing. It will your flexabilty which is main point in warm up

from flab to medium-fit
Going from flab to medium-fit
means moving up from stages 2 or
3 toward stage 4. If you are really
unfit and overweight, it’s difficult
to start – and sustain – a fitness
program. Here are some important
tips that make it easier:
1. Choose a form of exercise that you
enjoy.
If exercise isn’t pleasurable, it
turns into a grind. If you enjoy
dancing, try something like Zumba
classes. If you enjoy a challenge,
try martial arts. Or try tennis,
rowing, hiking, or the many other
forms of physical exercise.

2. Exercise with others
It’s much more fun, and much
easier to sustain a regular
practice, if you exercise with
others. Join classes, or club
together with neighbors or friends.

3. Build up your fitness step by step
It’s a mistake to rush into heavy
exercise. Your fitness practice
needs to be sustainable – after all,
you are building a new habit.
from medium-fit to cracking-fit
If your fitness is somewhere in the
middle range, you might want to
step up to what I call ‘cracking fit’,
which would be somewhere
between stages 6 and 7. That’s
what I’ve done since February.
I went back to martial art training
which I had put on hold for 6 years
because of health issues. You can
read about this in How to Fight
Your Way Back to Health After a
Bad Diagnosis

Karate training has given me a
good general fitness and I’m now
maybe a stage of about 6,5. Now I
want to step up to becoming ultra-
fit.

from cracking-fit to ultra-fit
My neighbor, Eddy Saxon, is truly
ultra-fit. For years he’s been
asking me to join his own private
training routine – but I’ve always
declined. I’m plain terrified of
training with Eddy! In the past, he
got me fit for each of my four
Blackbelt promotions in karate ,
but his sessions were a living
nightmare. He made me do sprints,
pushups, situps, and on and on,
until I collapsed. Then he’d shout,
“Jaksch, what’s the problem? Get
to it!”

Oh, my… (It worked though: Eddy
got me ultra-fit on each occasion)
Eddy Saxon used to be a
professional light-weight boxer.
Two days ago I happened to stop
by and Eddie immediately took me
down into his basement to do ‘a
bit of work on the punch bag’.
After a few minutes I was puffing
like a steam train! Eddy looked at
me pensively. “That was quite
good,” he said. “But I’d like to see
you step up to the routine I do,
which is to do the same workout
you just did – but to repeat it 25
times, with just 15 seconds rest in
between.” Yeah, right…

Eddy said that he’d like to teach
me to box (which would stand me
in good stead for karate sparring),
and said that he’d be delighted if I
would join him for his own work-
outs in order lift my fitness. I said
‘yes’. Tell me, am I crazy, or
what?!

Oh, did I happen to mention that
Eddy Saxon is 83 years old?
Yes, you can be ultra-fit at any
age. But you need to keep on
working at your fitness over the
years, like Eddy’s done.