The Busy Woman’s Complete Exercise Program
The Busy Woman’s Complete Exercise Program
Today, life can get too busy such that you sometimes wish you had more time. Between juggling your career, household chores, personal affairs, or maybe a husband and kids, it seems impossible to fit everything within 24 hours. What more for some exercise?
But then again, exercise is vital in your life, even when you can’t seem to find time for
it. You should hit the gym at least three times a week. That’s a “me” time you should not
do without – even when me-time is just an hour each day.
The One-Hour Complete Workout
You can get a complete workout in just one hour. This is advisable if you can only get three days a week of gym time. Tips here are intended to workout your whole body.
The quickie cardio: A cardiovascular workout is necessary for every workout program. You should get at least 20 minutes of cardio workout, three times a week. Start your exercise with a good run at the treadmill or the Nordic track, or a session at the stepper or the rowing machine. Whatever exercise you choose, remember that you should always challenge your heart. Warm up first for ten minutes, and then jump up your pace to up where you reach up to 85% of your maximum exercise heart rate. Try to keep this up for ten minutes and then cool down.
Big muscles first: Always start your weight lifting program with your big muscles. These are your legs, chest, and back. Squats are the fastest way to work out your legs. Plus with squats, you work out almost all of your leg muscles. If your workout target is to lose fat, do at least fifteen reps of squats for three sets. Use barbells that make you feel the weight while allowing you to ease through the number of sets you need to do. If your target is to build up strength, start with ten reps, with a moderate weight. Add weights and reduce your reps to eight. For the last set, add more weights and reduce your weight to six reps.
Chest exercises come after your legs. You can do bench presses, which is an old reliable gym exercise. Bench presses exercise your pectorals. Then comes your back exercise. You can do wide-arm lat pull downs using the lat machine that is common in gyms. This works out your upper back. For your mid back, you can do close-grip lat pull downs.
The small muscles come last. These are the biceps, triceps, and shoulders. In doing the major exercises, you already partially worked out these small muscles. You can do additional exercise for these at ideally fifteen reps for three sets.
Abs, abs, abs: Of course, who wouldn’t want a well-toned set of abs? But remember that those abs also depend on genetics. And abs exercises tone your abdominals; they do not get rid of the fat – cardio exercises do.
That doesn’t take away the importance of working out your abdominals though. Bicycles are the fastest way to work out the abs because these exercise the upper and lower abs and the obliques.
Don’t miss a stretch: After each workout session, always do a full body stretch. Each stretch position should last at least twenty seconds. Stretching is necessary to maintain your body’s flexibility.
Sources:
Homemakers.com
Fitness Magazine