Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Maximum Results

I have never much liked the idea of interval training. Once I get going, I never like to stop. Mostly for fear that once I stop I won’t get started again.

But now that I am at the ‘age’ where what worked for me in terms of exercise doesn’t seem to be the doing the trick as well anymore, it was suggested to me by one well versed in the subject of fitness that I should consider interval training, if indeed I wanted maximum results.

I am one of those women who is determined to fight the aging process every step of the way, so I decided to give it a try.

The first day of experimentation I added brief periods of sprints in between my normal fast walk. Always the researcher I noticed that the fast walking seemed easier after a sprint. And that the fast walk then felt like a rest. By the time I was done, I felt like I had a much better workout than usual. Perhaps there was something to this.


When I was done and soaking in the beauty that is early morning in Central Park in the spring,
the sun rising behind the buildings on the East Side, the forsythia and dogwood blooming in a sea of yellow, pink and white fringed with the young green grass, I got it. My aha!

Reinvention is a lot like interval training. I have to crank everything into high gear to really get the heart rate up and then break back into a steadier easier to breathe in pace for a while. An occasional break won’t hurt either. It’s the fits and starts that really get me were I need to go. And sometimes thinking there is only one way to get it done, the one way that always worked in the past, may not be the way that gets things moving forward. At least not if I'm after maximum results .

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