OK, now onto day 2. Today, we’re going to discuss about the basic routine you’ll have to do in order to keep yourself “top shape”. A daily routine consist of 4 important points: warm up, cardio, cooling down and logging. Let’s get into detail for each of these point.
THE DAILY ROUTINE
WARM UP
This step is important in order to activate your body and prepare it for intense workout. It helps to increase blood flow and warm up the muscle. If you don’t warm up, it’s possible that during your workout you could strain, pull or tear your muscle which isn’t good.
When you’ve warmed up, your muscle will be more apt to extreme conditions but this doesn’t mean you should attempt doing them. This will just prevent from any accident to occur if you weren’t warmed up. Warm up is used to increase the intensity of your physical activity because you do not want to jump from none to an extreme one.
The benefits of the warm up are numerous: higher effectiveness of your workout, higher muscle temperature which allows better elasticity and extensibility and increase of the heart rate.
A warm up could be:
- Jogging or jump-rope
- Calisthenic (dynamic) active stretches
- Sport-related exercise.
This stage will get your heart rate up and will increase your body temperature.
This stage prepares your body to do various movements. You should get your muscle to work on their full range. Press-ups, lunges and squat thrusts are good for this.
This stage involve repeating the same movement in order to heat specific areas which are used a lot in the sport you practice. If for example you play soccer, you’d prepare your kick by kicking the ball back and forth to a partner.
CARDIO
In this part you have the choice between running or biking. You can also do specific training such as Air Alert 3 (AA3) or High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).
If you’re on a day were you practice your sport, this would be the moment you’d be playing your game or doing whatever the sport is. Your body is now ready to accomplish what you want him to. If you haven’t been warmed up to swim, you might have some trouble at the beginning to feel great in the water. If you have warmed up, swimming benefits will be at their maximums.
COOLING DOWN
The cooling down step is important because it will help your body to remove the lactic acid waste created by the exercise. When you feel sore after exercising, this is most likely because you didn’t took the time to cool down. Stopping suddenly to do an intense activity will leave this acid in your muscle and this is why it hurts. The idea here is to slowly reduce the intensity of your sport. Say you’ve been running for a while, now start jogging, then walk. Then you can stop.
Once again, you’ll be performing stretching, but this time static active and static passive stretching. The goal of this type of stretching is to improve and facilitate your flexibility and the muscle will be quite warm at the moment. It will at the same time help your to relax as there’s no more cardiovascular activities going on.
KEEP TRACK (DAILY LOG)
This is part of day one idea. In order to keep you motivated, you must absolutely log your progress to see them increase. This will push you to do even more as you see you can.
Your log should contain:
- The date
- Your weight
- The exercice name
- The number of repetitions in each set
- The difficulty level of the exercise
- The lenght of the period
- The difficulty level of the exercise
- How you felt at the beginning of the workout
- How you felt at the end of the workout
- If it’s in sets
- If it’s on a period of time
I generally leave a mark beside the exercise I feel I can do more than what I’ve done that day. This way I know that tomorrow I’ll be doing more than what’s written there.
Here’s an example of an Excel sheet that would contain this information. Log example
It’s up to you to design your own if you don’t like this one.
Resume
WARM UP: Jogging or jump-rope, dynamic active stretching, sport related exercise.
CARDIO: Jogging or AA3 or HIIT or biking.
COOLING DOWN: Slow down the activity, static active and passive stretching.
LOGGING: Log your progress.
For stretching examples, I recommand Tricks Tutorial Developing flexibility. (Contain images)
A daily routine is important as it helps you keep the flow going on. When it’s installed, it’s a really good thing. When you’ll see the results, you’ll just want to keep going.
See you tomorrow for day 3.