Endurance-type activities improve your cardiovascular health, help you gain muscle, and cause you to lose body fat. An aerobic exercise is defined as any activity done continuously, increasing your heart rate and breathing for an extended period of time (i.e., more than two minutes), including dancing, swimming, bike riding, and fast walking. Although jogging and running also qualify, they are not recommended for the majority of adults over forty, as their high-impact nature may result in lower limb joint pain or injuries.
Examples of activities that range from mild to vigorous in intensity are listed in here:
Mild: Walking slowly (2 miles per hour or slower), gardening (weeding or watering), some household chores (e.g., washing dishes), walking or kicking in a swimming pool with a buoyancy belt, standing without support, shuffle board, and golfing with a cart (But most of these are too mild to be considered a part of your actual exercise program once your fitness level increases.)
Moderate: Swimming, bicycling (outdoors), cycling on a stationary bicycle, gardening (mowing, raking, or hoeing), walking briskly on a level surface, mopping or scrubbing floors, golfing without a cart (walking and carrying your own clubs), tennis (doubles), volleyball, rowing, water aerobics or other aquatic classes, most chair exercises, and dancing.
Vigorous: Climbing stairs or hills, shoveling snow, brisk bicycling up hills, digging holes, tennis (singles), swimming laps, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, hiking, jogging or running, and most sports (e.g., soccer or basketball)
If you have been inactive for a long time, you’ll need to work up gradually to doing the more intense activities. Start out with the mild to moderate activities and slowly build up to doing more. We recommend that you start by doing just five to ten minutes a day of an activity that you can easily perform and then increase the intensity of your workouts until your pulse is between 100 and 120 beats per minute. Don’t be discouraged if it takes you months to go from a very long-standing sedentary lifestyle to doing some of the harder activities. As you are able, increase the time you spend doing endurance activities to fifteen and ultimately twenty minutes or more. Note that this total leaves you at least ten minutes for other types of exercise to reach your thirty-minute training goal.
You should try to end up doing at least thirty minutes of total exercise on most days of the week. It is best to plan on exercising every day as you’ll likely miss a couple of days a week for various and sundry reasons. So planning on doing some activity every day will more likely result in at least five days per week. Take at least one day a week off to adequately rest and let your body repair and renew itself, but try to never miss two days in a row.
