Next time you go out for exercise, make a point of slowing down, at least for the first fifteen minutes or so. Go slow enough that it seems embarrassing, and then slow down even more. How slow can you go and still increase your fitness? There are a few ways to estimate your exertion. There's the "talk test." If you're going too slow or too easy, you should be able to sing while you're exercising.
If you're exerting yourself moderately, you should be able to carry on a conversation. If you are breathing too hard to talk beyond grunts and "uh-huh," that is considered vigorous activity. If you use this scale, you should stay firmly in conversational mode for the first part of your exercise. If you're new to moving yourself about, you shouldn't push yourself much past that range for four to six weeks, depending on your age, prior experience, and medical history.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encourage exercisers to use the Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion. The Borg Scale goes from 6 to 20. The reason it doesn't go from 1 to 15 is that your Borg rating times ten would roughly correlate to heart rate (more later on that). If you dig the Borg, your warm-up and cool-down should stay in the 11 to 12 range.
While warming up and cooling down, there should be no feeling of suffering or struggle. You should feel like, "Hey, I can do this all day." In the middle part of your workout, you can always ramp up your intensity if you want to. But the slower you start, the more thoroughly your body will adapt when you go faster.
Anyone who undertakes a fitness initiative - whether it's to move more, have more fun while moving, get fit for a trek in Bhutan, or build enough stamina to dance all night at your high school reunion - will benefit from keeping a journal of some sort. Whether you do it in an Excel spreadsheet, use an online journaling tool, or write it on a yellow legal pad, it's fun and gratifying to track what you did, when you did it, how you felt when you did it. And one of the things it's good to put in your journal is something you're proud of on the day.
You may be proud that you got all the way down on the floor during your pigeon pose. You may take pride in running for five minutes longer than you ever have before. You may take pride in the fact that you felt proud for the first time out in the park. Look back after a month of doing your thing and see how much you have to be proud of. You hiked four miles with fifteen pounds in your pack!
You looked at yourself in the mirror and smiled, on two different days. Each grain of pride may seem minuscule by itself, but the key is to start piling up those grains until you're standing on a mountain.
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