How to improve your physical fitness.

Physical fitness is defined as being in good shape or condition to perform physical activities. If you are week in your level of fitness, you need to develop a regular exercise program and proper nutrition.

How to determine and improve your state of physical fitness?

• Energy level.

You can tell the condition of your fitness by looking at how you feel and move your body when you wake up in the morning, after a long day at work or when you exert your muscles to climb up the stairs or walk a certain distance.

If your feel drained and experience fatigue and unable to exert yourself further, you are obviously unfit.

What you can do to improve your physical fitness is to start something small and light. If you have not been doing any kind of exercise, you need to push yourself to at least take a brisk walk for about 10 minutes. Take a short rest and start over again. If you consistently do this, you will gain momentum and it gets easier and it will enable you to stretch further.

As you become more fit and healthy, you will naturally become more positive and optimistic and that will increase your energy level.

• Physical appearance - Body fat and weight.

The body mass index (BMI) is commonly used to measure the percentage of body fat. The purpose of this measure is to determine the right weight for your height. When you know that you are either overweight or underweight, you can take the necessary action to correct it.

People who are obese are usually unfit and have health related problems. The cause is improper nutrition and lack of physical activities. Going on a crash diet might help you lose weight temporarily only because there is a possibility that you may gain that back. However, dieting alone will not improve fitness.

It is highly recommended that you focus on getting the proper nutrition and at the same time do vigorous aerobic exercises like brisk walking, jogging or stair stepping every day for 30 minutes, including doing stretches. You will burn those fats and build muscles instead.

• Flexibility and inclination to exercise injuries.

If you are prone to injuries, stiff joints, muscle aches and pains after a workout or training, you might need to seek help from a physical trainer to learn the proper sequence. Your enthusiasm to build muscles and gain strength may backfire if you are ignorant on the basics like stretching, your program choice, frequency, cooling down stretches, and etc.

Your body movements can affect your mood too. Training or exercising the wrong way will make you weary after each session. If this happens too often, check if you are breathing properly during your workout. Many people are either ignorant or confused when to breathe in and when to exhale during training.

It is best that you start your physical fitness program with aerobic exercises before getting into strength or weight training. What's the point of working out excessively and then falling ill or injuring yourself that keeps you for days away from training?

• Endurance.

You can check your cardiovascular and muscular endurance by attempting to check on how you manage from long distance running and doing push ups.

You can practice endurance training by doing your exercise and taking short breaks in between.

Let's just say that you can only do 5 push ups; take a few minutes break and then add to the number that you have previously done. Intervals between each session will allow you to improve your ability to do more and you will improve your physical fitness.

If you are lifting weight, you could try with something you are comfortable with and increase it as you progress.

Aerobic exercise is still the best endurance activity because abundance supply of oxygen is being circulated in your body. You can start to by taking brisk walks, then jog and when you have gained the momentum over a period of time, change it to running.

You tend to inhale more oxygen during aerobic exercise and you heart rate increases as it pumps more oxygen to your body system to provide you with the energy. At the same time it increases your waste elimination process.

• Your recovery heart rate.

It simply means the number of minutes it takes you to get back to your resting heart rate after an aerobic exercise and it is counted in minutes. The faster your recover means the more fit you are.

The best time to find out your resting heart rate is when you get up in the morning. You determine your resting heart rate by counting your pulse beats for six seconds and multiplying it by ten. The lower it is, the better is your condition.

By monitoring your heart rate during training or exercise and the time it takes to recover, allows you to know if your heart is working hard or otherwise. It will then enable you to either reduce if you are over exerting, or increase your training.

If you want to know more about heart rate, click on the link.

Before you decide on a physical fitness program, make sure you check with a physician. This is especially applicable if you are over the age of 35, have health related problems on have been going through a sedentary lifestyle.

Prolonged physical inactivity follows with a decline in physical fitness. It creates health related problems and a whole range of other complications.

Neglecting to exercise and keeping yourself in shape makes even your daily task becomes a big burden.

Remember that whatever you do, it has a processional effect. A little bit of progress each day to keep in shape will have a cumulative effect after a while.

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