Skip to main content

Make the right choice of exercise

Image
By
Having been convinced that exercise is necessary for well-being and that an appropriate amount of daily dose of aerobics is the requirement, we need to move to the very important issue of choosing the right one that suits your requirements and constraints. Here are a few tips:

  • Brisk walks: This is the form most frequently prescribed by doctors. What you need to assess is where can you take your walk, and how safe is it for you? If you are in a gated campus or near a park or the botanical garden, you are lucky. If you wander on the streets especially in the early pre-dawn hours. You could be in for trouble. Enthusiastic walkers being knocked down by rogue drivers or attacked by criminals is increasingly becoming common. Hence safety should be a pre-condition. Also, the vagaries of weather, during monsoons, foggy winters and desiccating summers should not cause long interruptions.
  • Going to the Gym. I think it is a good method for 3 reasons: the weather cannot play spoil-sport; you have several options to add variety to your exercise, and last but not least, provides a sense of compulsion once you have paid up. Further, when you see others struggling too, you realize you are not alone in your endeavour.
  • Cycling: Excellent exercise, especially for those with creaky knees as it is non-weight-bearing. The safety concerns mentioned under walking, however apply here too.
  • Games: Games such as shuttle, tennis, squash or golf are excellent because they add the extra value of entertainment that the previous three do not. When you play a game, you cannot help but challenge your opponent, and in doing so, your own body as well. Further, group activities are more motivating. Our tennis session in the morning was the best way to start the day for many years. Golf is unique in the sense that you do not need a partner or an opponent, as you challenge your own self. It is however time consuming and expensive and the family may resent the long hours you spend away from home on weekends.
  • For out-door games, weather does become an interrupting factor. Our paunches used to become prominent during monsoons and the foggy winter weeks. Switching to an alternative (shuttle for instance) that could be played indoors, was an effective strategy.
  • Gadgets at home: This can be very effective and practical, provided, and let me state it in capitals, PROVIDED, you are the disciplined type with loads of will power. I have seen several people clutter their homes with treadmills and cross-trainers that they do not put to use.


This list is neither complete nor exhaustive, but should help you decide how to approach the issue of choosing the right exercise. Also it is good to change the form every few months so that it does not become repetitive and boring.


Pant your way to healthy excitement!

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 2nd March, 2014.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food supply.
2 comments
Read more

Bad Dreams, Disturbed Sleep

By
  A good night’s sleep, so essential to rest your body and mind, and restore ‘energy” and vitality, is becoming a casualty for many these days. Last week a 58 year old lady complained that she woke up with a startle in the middle of the night dreaming of “drugs”, something she had never been exposed to all her life. Another reported a nightmare in which he felt someone was “strangulating” him by tightening something around his neck, till he woke up feeling choked! Yet another reported dreaming that he was in an ICU of a hospital with PPE draped figures surrounding his bed while he was being prepared to be hooked to a ventilator. Bad dreams can be disturbing to say the least. One wakes up with a startle or in sweat, feeling disturbed and uneasy, and feeling drained. The mood in the morning is usually uneasy and snappy. Creative thinking has usually gone for a toss…postponed to yet another day when one feels more cheerful and positive.   Several factors could be contributing to “
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to get closer to thei
2 comments
Read more