What do you need to do before and after taking up exercise?

There are few things that can affect how your body responds to fitness. These are your body shape, lifestyle, genetic make-up, cardiovascular ability and overall health. All these play a major role to shape your individual fitness ability.

Now five components that make your overall fitness complete are flexibility, muscular endurance, muscular strength, your own body composition and cardiovascular or aerobic endurance.

So how can you tell if your exercise and healthy diet habits are paying off?

To know this, thorough fitness evaluations which include exercises like the step tests, sit and reach, few seconds of jumps, number of push-ups per given time and certain activities that specifically measure your muscular strength, endurance and joint flexibility are usually conducted.

Special tools are also used to determine your body fat composition or else percentage of the total body fat like fat caliper.

If you can slowly develop an action plan to work on your fitness however which state you are, either if you are fit or not, there are a few things you need to consider anytime.

Avoid overexertion. One of the best preventative step to take is to check your resting heart rate before getting out of bed each morning and chart it down so that you can see if there is a gradual decrease just increase you’ve been exercising.

If your resting heart rate begins to increase, it may be a sign that you need to take things slow. Another indicator is that muscle soreness that doesn’t go away after a couple of days.

 As you always work on improving your fitness, it’s important to take it slow and steady to avoid injuries like muscle tears, cramps, spasm and burnout.

Walking is the simplest and easiest way to get started and is manageable for anyone who is either fit or not.

Just think of it in three parts: five to ten minutes warm up of walking slowly, followed by a fast or hill walk, then a five minutes cool down of walking slowly.

This will improve your cardio activity at any given pace that you want given that you are consistent with it.

Gauge the amount of exercise your body can take. This means you exercise at a moderate intensity level for at least two and half hours spread over most days each week.

At least two to three times a week, supplement aerobic exercise with weight bearing activity that largely target all your major muscles that include legs, butt, back and chest area.

Try to avoid inactivity; some exercise at any level of intensity is better than none.