There is one mistake that exists among the majority of people who run. Many of us start running sharply and finish in an abrupt manner when the training is completed.

What I mean by that is, one minute you see a person entering the gym and the very next minute the treadmill that they are running on is making a loud noise, almost as though the machine is ready to break. The person looks like they are escaping from some mafia, armed to their teeth with tommy-guns, chasing after them.

When training without a basic warm-up the body perceives this as stress and unfortunately, this makes its effectiveness minimal. If you have ever had an appointement with a professional at the SRWC, for example, which can be easily arranged through filling out the Fitness Assesment packet, you were probably explained the importance of a gentle start and soft finish when it comes down to a cardio work out. The body will give the correct response if you gradually increase the speed by warming up for at least five minutes before challenging your body.

At this point, you have to plan cardio training in accordance to personal goals. Let’s say a person wants to train his or her heart muscle for the more efficient pump that will result in faster exchange of nutrients and wastes, carbon dioxide and oxygen to benefit their health. Then, they have to run at increased levels to put the emphasis of their aerobic work out onto a heart muscle. What if a person wants to loose weight or focus on decreasing body fat percentage ?

In that case, the speed should allow the person to be able to simultaneously talk on the phone without choking. The speed of exercise is important to consider, due to the fact that human skeletal muscles branch into three different muscle fibers: fast twitch glycolytic, fast twitch oxidative glycolitic and slow twitch oxydative.

The types are distinguished by the speed of their shortening, but more importantly, depend on different sources of energy gathered to allow for contraction to occur. Although the person burns some fat at the shortening of all three muscle fibers, the slow twitch oxidative type gather energy directly from fat.

In contrast, the two other types of muscle fibers contract through the break down of carbohydrates in the form of glycogen first, and only after the primary fuel source is gone, begin to break down fats as the back-up energy source.

In general, the main goal of each individual before coming to the gym should be to prevent a possible harm of their body. Just one move so often leads to a significant injury, especially when you have no muscle memory,  which by term is consolidation of a specific motor task into memory through repetition. Thus, reading over an anatomy textbook before coming to the gym would give a good idea of how your body is structured. For example, you see a person with big belly, nine months preganant,jump-roping. What is the purpose ?

Everyone has already heard the fact that crunches have a secondary affect on strengthening the abdomen, the appearance of which is directly achieved through the right diet, but many people still decide to exaust themselves with all sorts of regular crunches, twisted crunches, bicycle crunches, double crunches, verticle leg crunches, raised crunches and many more, believing that this magic exercise will help them to loose fat exactly in the abdominal area. They don’t want to listen, period, and as a result getting their fit-ball crunches in instead of getting good-looking abs. It’s known that professional body builders only occasionally work on their abdomen to avoid muscle misbalance, but the ones who actually do have “6 pack” remain on a low-carb diet.

   In the end, our body is our home, an Armageddon that you invest tons of materials, time, effort and funding into. The body is the home that is much more real than concrete, brick or wooden walls that we sleep and eat behind. If the structure of the wall will get destroyed, you might still survive but if the body is destroyed, you are dead. Am I being clear?

Even though the body is a home for each of us, strangely, many people still decide to live in clogged, smelly shacks. Even our houses sometimes don’t look as filthy, flabby, fat and flaccid as our bodies. Why do you care much about the hue of the curtains while your most important house given by God is covered with an excess lipid layer?

It is as if you hung a chandelier and rejoiced that it’s hanging, not knowing that the thread will shortly break and the structure will fall on your head.