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News : The first steps to cardiac fitness
Amador Ledger-Dispatch - Jackson,CA,USA, August 19 2005 -- Last week I discussed how to measure your level of cardiac fitness. Now let’s talk about how to improve it. You will need a measure of your progress. The best test is to take your resting pulse rate first thing in the morning.
I attended the Health and Fitness Festival last Saturday and a friend saw me there and said how she managed to find her pulse after reading my column (turning your right hand face up and putting your middle and index fingers of your left hand on your right thumb and sliding them down to the little valley between the bump and the little bone on the right side of your wrist). However she couldn’t figure out how to time it so I showed her how to simultaneously look at the watch on her left wrist and count the beats for 15 seconds. We did this together and she got 20. We multiplied that by four determining her rate at 80 beats per minute.
She remembered that I had stated that mine averaged 48. So what does 80 tell us? Her heart has to work much harder than mine to pump the same amount of blood. If her heart becomes stressed (e.g., a blockage in one or more of her arteries), her heart muscle won’t be as strong as mine and might suffer damage where a stronger heart might not. Most likely my arteries are a lot larger in diameter than hers since I have forced lots of blood through them through exercise.
Study after study show that exercising the heart muscle has many benefits, not just for heart related diseases, but many other ailments as well. But how do you get there? Is it a very difficult task? Is it too late for you? Now comes the good news. Those of you with high resting pulse rates have the most to gain by exercise. I can’t do much more but you can. You can have tremendous benefits with some effort.
The key is to start slow and smart. Please don’t start by running fast down your driveway. For those of you who hated P.E. in school and were never good at athletics, your time has arrived. You can become an athlete. Many of those high school super athletes are now overweight and will be no match for the new you. Slow and smart means you begin an easy distance exercise routine and monitor your progress. There is no single best way for everyone but there is a best one for you which you will find by experimenting.
All you need is a pair of athletic shoes and a digital sports watch. Such a watch is not expensive and will be an important investment. It will have a stopwatch mode that you will start and stop during your exercise. No matter what movement exercise you pick to do, you will need to time how long you did it and what distance you went. Although there are lots of alternatives on where to get your exercise, I would like to first suggest finding a country road. We have many back country roads in Amador County that have little traffic. Find one you find appealing or one near your house. Roads I like include Electra Road (the one between Amador and Calaveras counties), Amador Road between Sutter Creek and Amador City, French Bar Road by Raley’s, Quartz Mountain Road and Sutter Creek-Volcano Road. The advantage is the peaceful scenery and little traffic. Here is what you do when you get out there: Begin by walking briskly for 30 minutes. This may mean going out for 15 minutes and back for 15 minutes. Remember how far you went. Wait one day and try it again and see if you can go a little farther. Begin taking your resting pulse right after you wake up in the morning and see if you notice it declining.
(source : www.ledger-dispatch.com)
