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Your Milage May Vary
We have all heard the universal prescription for personal good health: diet and exercise. But I dare say most of us (especially Americans) are severely challenged in following this advice.
There are, of course, some individuals who are either self-motivated or self-disciplined enough; and there are the rare individuals who are blessed with both personality traits. The rest of us, however, are cursed.
So what's the problem? It's human nature. More specifically, evolution (or God) has burdened us with two literally deadly sins: gluttony and/or sloth. Gluttony is the purview of dieticians. In this post, I discuss my own personal work-around for sloth.
Knowing that I don't have an abundance of self-discipline to overcome my laziness, I have embarked on an experimental path to find my holy grail: an aerobic sweet spot I can live with on a daily basis.
Most personal training advice (that I am aware of) suggests an exercise routine for a minimum of 30 minutes duration per day, and a frequency of 5 days per week. I have chosen as my goal a daily walk of 40 minutes duration. Having established those a priori duration and frequency parameters, my remaining optimization task was to find the maximum aerobic intensity that would not exceed the limit of my reluctance to do the routine at all.
The aerobic intensity is a measure of walking pace, and the product of pace and duration is energy expended (or work produced by the aerobic activity). I assume that the health benefit is proportional to the amount of activity, up to some limit that I am not in danger of even approaching.
This is how I found my own personal aerobic-intensity sweet spot, which is defined by the distance I walk in roughly 40 minutes time. So far I have managed to keep my sloth at bay.
There are, of course, some individuals who are either self-motivated or self-disciplined enough; and there are the rare individuals who are blessed with both personality traits. The rest of us, however, are cursed.
So what's the problem? It's human nature. More specifically, evolution (or God) has burdened us with two literally deadly sins: gluttony and/or sloth. Gluttony is the purview of dieticians. In this post, I discuss my own personal work-around for sloth.
Knowing that I don't have an abundance of self-discipline to overcome my laziness, I have embarked on an experimental path to find my holy grail: an aerobic sweet spot I can live with on a daily basis.
Most personal training advice (that I am aware of) suggests an exercise routine for a minimum of 30 minutes duration per day, and a frequency of 5 days per week. I have chosen as my goal a daily walk of 40 minutes duration. Having established those a priori duration and frequency parameters, my remaining optimization task was to find the maximum aerobic intensity that would not exceed the limit of my reluctance to do the routine at all.
The aerobic intensity is a measure of walking pace, and the product of pace and duration is energy expended (or work produced by the aerobic activity). I assume that the health benefit is proportional to the amount of activity, up to some limit that I am not in danger of even approaching.
This is how I found my own personal aerobic-intensity sweet spot, which is defined by the distance I walk in roughly 40 minutes time. So far I have managed to keep my sloth at bay.
Post 1,983 “My Own Aerobic Sweet Spot”
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