Team ARIA

By Elizabeth Prom-Wormley

Good day readers and subscribers! This week we are beginning a series called “Healthy Life Hacks”. Today’s Healthy Life Hack focuses on staying physically active and fit. We also have a guest author and tips to stay active!!!

The following statistics are results from the Seventh District Health and Wellness Survey regarding physical activity of East End residents.

Number of times physically active for at least 30 minutes last week	N	Percent
0	176	19.2
1-2	234	25.5
3-6	227	24.7
7-9	115	12.5
10-14	166	18.1
Total	918

It seems that there is a fairly even distribution of weekly physical activity ranging from no activity to several hours of physical activity.

This week our featured guest is our very own teammate Jim Clifford! Jim has some Life Hacks on how to easily get some daily exercise:

“Fitness is an important step that we can all take. However, one of the complaints I’ve heard most often when it comes to fitness is, ‘I just don’t have the time.’ It’s true, we may not have that spare 90 minutes a day to complete the Yoga X session from Tony Horton’s popular P90X at home fitness DVD, but we can all find a few minutes a day where we can easily multitask with exercise! For instance, while microwaving some leftovers, you could easily drop down and knock out as many push-ups as possible in that 30-second span. Or designate one room in your house (I like to use the one with the TV) as the ‘toll room’; you have to pay the toll every time you leave, and the toll can be whatever you want! Want to work on your abs this week? 15 crunches to exit the room! Feel like your back needs some work? 5 wide-grip pull-ups! For those adventurous ones out there, you could try to max out on a particular exercise, like push-ups, and then count backward from that number in increments of 5 until you hit zero. Say I can do 40 push-ups. I do them and the next time I drop down I do 35, then 30, then 25, and so on until I hit zero. By the end of the day I’ve done almost 200 push-ups but I’ve only used at most a minute and a half of time!”

Sometimes it can be incredibly simple to get good daily exercise without much thinking or effort. Bruce Lee is a legendary martial artist who developed the hand-to-hand combat system known as Jeet Kune Do. In the expanded edition of the book “Tao of Jeet Kune Do”, Bruce Lee gives us easy everyday exercising tips.

Page 29

Everyday Opportunities for Exercise

• Take a walk whenever you can—like parking the car a few blocks away from your destination.

• Avoid taking the elevator; climb the stairs instead.

• Cultivate your quiet awareness by imagining an opponent attacking you while you are sitting, standing, or lying down, etc.—and counter that attack with various moves. Simple move are the best.

• Practice your balance by standing on one foot to put your clothes or shoes on—or simply stand on one foot whenever you choose.

For those who want to take their fitness training to the next level, Bruce Lee says the following about endurance and endurance training on pages 47-48 of Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

Endurance

Endurance is developed by hard and continuous exercise which exceeds the “steady” physiological state and produces near exhaustion, temporarily. Considerable respiratory and muscular distress should develop.

Most beginning athletes are unwilling to drive themselves hard enough. They should punish themselves and then rest adequately, only to increase the output of effort after the rest. Long hours of work made up of many short, high-speed efforts interspersed with periods of milder activity seem to be the best endurance-training procedure.

Four hypotheses for extra-endurance sports:

1. Endurance can be acquired through a rather extensive succession of sprints interspersed with easier running.
2. One trains for endurance that is specific to a particular rate of speed.
3. Extreme endurance training should include much more and longer work than what has been customary. (Such as “Spartan” training is for the champ.)
4. An occasional change of pace should be included that employs different movements and, to some degree, different muscle fibers.

Exercises for endurance development should be gradually and carefully increased. Six weeks seem to be a scanty minimum for sports that require considerable endurance and six weeks are really only the beginning. The peak of achievement will be approached in years.

Endurance is lost rapidly if one ceases to work at its maintenance.

Stay tuned for more “Healthy Life Hacks”