What Type of Exercise Should I do?

What type of exercise should you do, how do you do it, and how can you implement an exercise plan that will be beneficial to your overall health?

There are various ways to exercise and incorporate physical activity into your life. You may have heard of resistance or weight training, aerobic or cardio training, stretching and mobility exercises and you may already be doing them without knowing which type of training you are doing!

So first off, let’s define what the different types of exercises are. 

Resistance Training

Often called weight training, it can be defined as using resistance to produce a muscular contraction to build strength, anaerobic endurance and improve the size of the skeletal muscles.

Aerobic Training

This is any activity that uses large muscle groups and can be maintained continuously and is rhythmic in nature e.g. cycling, jogging/long distance running, swimming, walking. 

Flexibility

Is the ability to move through a joint’s range of motion where improving joint range of motion and flexibility can be achieved by engaging in flexibility exercises that are specific to the joint of interest.

The Benefits

The benefits of engaging in regular exercise including resistance and aerobic training include:

• Significantly better cardiometabolic risk profiles
• Lower risk of all-cause mortality
• Fewer cardiovascular disease events
• Lower risk of developing physical function limitations 
• Lower risk of nonfatal disease

In addition, significant beneficial changed in health-related biomarkers can be seen including improvements in: 

• Body composition 
• Blood glucose levels 
• Insulin sensitivity 
• Blood pressure 

Now that we’ve got the main different types of exercises that people with generally do, which one should you do and how should you do it? 

The answer to this is not black and white as it is dependent on you as a person, your goals, injuries/condition,  likes/dislikes, and many other factors.

So, to tackle this question, this guide will be very general so it can be adapted to everyone. If you would like to create a personal exercise program, it will be beneficial to book in a consult with an Exercise Physiologist that can help you with this. 

The recommendation for resistance training is to incorporate 2-3 days targeting each muscle group a week. You want to be targeting your major muscle groups including your upper body (Chest, back, shoulders and core), Lower body (Glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings, calves). 

For aerobic training, the recommendation is to incorporate at least 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise or 75 minutes a week of vigorous intensity exercise.

To know what moderate intensity exercise is, you can simply judge it by a talk test. Exercising at a moderate intensity, you should be able string a few sentences together without being too puffed. Whereas exercising at a vigorous intensity means you can’t talk unless you pause and catch your breath. 

With flexibility exercises there are a wide range of techniques you can use to improve the flexibility of a given muscle or range of a joint. These include static stretching, PNF stretching, dynamic stretching and many more.

You can do flexibility and mobility exercises everyday and the type that you do will be dependent on your specific needs. For example, if you are squatting and aren’t able to get into full depth squat or it feels tight, it may help to stretch out the hip flexors. 

Applying this practically, your weekly exercise plan might look like this: 

In summary, incorporating all types of training will be important to acquire the benefits from exercising.

The above example is a general guideline to how you would incorporate both modalities into your week, however every person is different depending on their goals.

The important factors I like to consider is engaging in an exercise activity that you enjoy, making sure when I am exercising, I am making the most of the 30 or 45 minutes or 60 minute of exercise I am engaging in and to have a plan and goal set. 

Want To Know More?

We’d suggest contacting our team at Precision Physio, so that we can help you with your individual case and likely get you in to see one of our great Exercise Physiologists.

How Do I Book An Appointment?

We’re taking the health of our clients, members and staff very seriously and our preference would be for you to call to book an appointment so that we can make sure to explain our approach to keeping you safe. You can call any of these numbers to schedule a session:

• Precision Physio Concord: 02 9736 3950
• Precision Physio St Marys: 02 9623 2220
• Precision Physio Mt Druitt: 02 9188 2552

Online Consultations

Evolving with the current environment, we are also now offering online appointments, meaning that we can support anyone who is unable to leave their home. Sessions are done via our state of the art Telehealth system and as long as you have a laptop or tablet with an inbuilt camera, or a phone with camera, we can help!

To learn more about online consultations, please call us on any of the numbers listed above.