Another great health thing that happened locally this week has opened up a way for us to exercise easily and effectively.
The Coronary and Lung Team Manager gave a presentation at the North West Health Community Consultative Committee this week.
They provide excellent coronary rehabilitation for people who have had some sort of heart attack. It is free.
What struck me was that the key knowledge they want their coronary rehabilitation patients to go away with from the eight week program is an understanding of how to self-monitor their exercise exertion levels and to keep them within the moderate range and not get into the high exertion range which is the danger zone. Think about it! That’s a great message. Keep to the moderate exertion range when you exercise and avoid getting into the high exertion range.
The next thing they talked about was Interval Training and this completely meshed with the approach taken by Curves at Keperra. This is short intense time intervals for any one exercise. We are talking 30 seconds then stopping. That is really manageable. Not going on and on past exhaustion!
So here is where it starts getting put together. We have heaps of opportunity to do 30 second bursts of moderate exertion exercise throughout the day. What we need is to do a total of 60 of them over the day. It might be walking 30 steps briskly. It might be climbing 10 stairs. It might be swimming 30 strokes in the pool. It might be punching arms out 30 times. It might be carrying the shopping in from the car. Each can count as one set of exercise towards the daily total of 60. All we have to do is keep track of where we are up to during the day and keep steadily adding to our total.
There was one more pointer that was made quite definitely. Most heart attacks and strokes happen in the morning when our blood is still ‘thick’. We need to wake our blood up. Have some drinks of water. Don’t go hard into exercise first thing in the morning. Get our system going gently first up. Hydrate ourselves after a long night of gradually dehydrating.