Every exercise plan begins with a single step. If you are extremely out of shape, focus on short-term goals so that you do not feel overwhelmed. The simplest way to begin a fitness plan is to incorporate walking into your daily life. Set small goals such as parking further from where you work or taking an evening stroll around the neighborhood with family. Use a pedometer to measure the number of steps you walk. After a week, divide the total number of steps by the number of days you walked to get your average number of steps per workout. (You might want to sign up with this guy) Spend the next week slowly adding to your number of steps so that the week totals another 1,000 steps. Your long-term goal should be to walk 10,000 steps per day.
** Note from Marco ** Exercise is work. It elevates your heart rate, makes you somewhat breathless, and causes your muscles to burn. It's tiring—sometimes exhausting. Yes, exercise does get easier with time, but it will never be "easy." If it were easy, it wouldn’t be exercise and everyone would be doin' it. You see, beyond just getting your body moving (which is great but will only get you so far), exercise has to challenge you. You have to work past your comfort zone in order to train your heart, lungs, and muscles to get stronger and fitter. Over time, yes it will become easier to walk at the 3 mph pace you started, but once that becomes easy, it's time to walk faster, which brings me to another cold, hard truth: You have to work harder as you get fitter. Think of it exercise as a challenge to continuously improve on what you just accomplished. Remember, it's the start that stops most people.
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