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Exercise is an important part of reaching your health and wellness goals, but how much do you really need, I am only interested in doing the minimum amount of exercise based around my already full lifestyle.  In part 4 of My Health and Wellness Journey I will take you through how I approached exercise, what my goals are and why.

My approach to exercise

So, a few things I need to base my exercise around

• I am a father and husband, family will always come first, so I have to make time to reach my exercise goals
• I work a lot, full-time work plus passion projects including Future Health Fitness

I can only do so much and realise most people are in the a similar position to myself, so how can I get the best benefits with the time I have.

I am hoping that this might give others the knowledge that you don’t need to have hours each day to correct your own health.

Exercise goals

The plan is to start walking first thing in the morning and then again in the early evening.  The goal is to walk between 10,000 and 15,000 steps per day for starters and get into the rhythm and monitor my progress.

With 5am starts I can fit in a short 30-45 min walk before the kids get up but this also means early to bed, say around 8:30pm to get a recommended 8 hours sleep.  Will see how this approach to exercise goes.

I will track all my exercise via my Withings ScanWatch and Strava so I can analyse and track my progress and make any adjustments I feel necessary.

Below you can see my test walk, taking the Greenway path from Croydon to Bowden, making a small tour of Bowden and then back.  I will attempt to do this both morning and evening to get the steps in I need.

Strava Map of Walk

Interested to see if my pace gets better as the joints losen and the body sheds weight.

Options to reach goals

As I find a balance I will be keen to see how adding some cycling or other aerobics exercise will work.  As I stated previous cycling was my focus for many years, training and racing till I was 35.  I have always been keen on getting back into cycling but my body with it’s variety of injuries might not be so keen.

I will aim to complete 30-50 push ups and round 100 crunches each day just to keep some muscle mass during my weight loss period.

I am also keen to look at something like bouldering once my body weight comes down.

At this stage I am not interested in going to a gym, building muscle or anaerobic exercise I am purely concentrating on exercise for weight loss and healing my body before considering what might be next.

Pairing exercise and diet

The research that I have been doing around the Keto diet suggests keeping exercise to a minimum to control weight loss, don’t want to stress the body out too much in the early stages especially with fasting.  So again short walks of around 30-45mins are perfect, not too vigorous for starters and monitor daily.

I am expecting feeling sluggish in the morning walk being just over halfway into fasting but some research suggests this won’t happen and I will have increased energy.  It will be interesting to see how my body reacts to the changes in diet and exercise, time will tell.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) & Caloric Expenditure

So based on my FHF scan I can use the calculator to work out what my BMR v’s Caloric Expenditure should be to reach my goals.  This will change overtime, and once I get into the rhythm of my body and lifestyle, adjustments can be made at each scan to make sure I am not stressing my body out at any stage.

The reason why I am documenting this is I want people to know that small lifestyle changes are hugely beneficial to their health.  I feel most people think that it takes hours at the gym or giving up too much, but in most cases we are talking small changes for maximum gains.

Below you can see the information the Styku scanner reports on, making it easy to track and understand the information to be tracked and acted on.

Fat loss Calculator

BMR + Caloric Expenditure Calculator

My numbers

So here are the starting numbers at a basic level.

Age: 43

Height: 197cm

Weight: 100.8kg (basic scales)

Known issues: Asthma, High Cholesterol 6.5 total

General health: uncomfortable in my gut, fatigue, bad sleeping habits, brain fog most of the time

Part 5: First Month

With all the planning completed, let’s put it to the test.  I will take you through what worked and what didn’t, any changes to the plan and of course track all the numbers to show how I reached my first month goals.