Exercise Types

This is the final chapter before I give you concrete exercises or activities to do. Here, I want to briefly discuss the three main categories of exercise: cardio, strength and coordination.

All of them are important. You have to vary your exercises anyway (remember?), and this is a great way to do it. Over a three day period, vary between the three types! This also gives your body enough time to recover and repair. Training strength 100% of the time isn’t useful. Your muscles aren’t ready for the next training session yet, so they perform worse, and you gain almost nothing from the training session.

Cardio

This is about stamina: lung capacity, muscle fatigue, focus.

These exercises usually …

Burn many calories
Target your whole body and all your physical systems
But don’t build muscle. (In fact, it might break them down because they’re in the way.)

Some people easily get their cardio, others struggle the most with this type.

Why? Cardio can come from simple activities, like walking or cycling. People that already do this, perhaps for school or work, will automatically get their cardio training every day.

But cardio also takes the longest to execute and requires the most space. You can’t do a cardio exercise in 5 minutes. The whole point is that it tests your stamina, so you need to do it for at least 30+ minutes.

As such, the easiest way to make this a habit, is by making it part of your lifestyle. Find some reason to walk or cycle somewhere every day. Find a time at which you can take a long break and walk around your house, garden, neighbourhood, whatever. Join a sports club you like that’s all about cardio.

If that’s not possible, you’ll have to buy some (relatively expensive) equipment for training cardio at home. Why isn’t this great? Because this equipment can’t completely simulate the real activity, it’s hard to find motivation, and it prevents variation.

To combat this, if budget allows, buy several different machines. One for cycling, one for running, one for rowing.

Of all these, rowing actually has my preference. It is tough on the whole body: both legs and upper body. It is a great cardio exercise. It doesn’t strees your knees and joints as much, and people can typically do it longer because they’re sitting comfortably. Rowing machines can also be folded and aren’t that expensive.

Example

Almost all my doctors made me do rowing or similar exercises at one point or another. And most of the time, they were right: even though it was a bit boring, it helped a lot.

Strength

This is about strength of muscles, but also bones.

To strengthen your bones, you just need to put your body to the test. Jump, run, fall, climb, really throw that body around it. Put pressure on it.

Example

We know people have been predominantly right-handed for a long time. Why? Because we found skeletons where the bone on the left arm was very small or even gone, while the right arm was much thicker and well-preserved. Putting more stress on a bone, using it more, actually makes it grow thicker and stronger.

This also combines with my advice to teach yourself activities with both left and right (arms or legs). To not let a bone grow too small.

To strengthen muscles, you’ll need targeted exercise. It’s amazing how a weird position, or the addition of even a tiny weight, can target one specific muscle you didn’t know you had.

As such, there’s no reason to make this too complicated. You don’t need long sessions, with boring repetitions, using huge weights.

You need smart, varied exercises that challenge your body in new ways. This grows muscle strength across the board. It’s usually more fun to do and an easier habit to maintain.

All my doctors agreed on this. An exercise is perfect for you if …

You can do 10–15 repetitions
For three sets. (Do a set, take a short break, do another set, …)
And then your muscles fail. They just can’t do it anymore.

If you can’t do that many, it’s too hard. If you can do way more, it doesn’t really challenge you. (In a sense, that’s when weight training merely becomes cardio training.)

Coordination

This part is often overlooked. But the idea is simple: any exercise that helps you to actually use that stamina and strength you have. One that builds balance, coordination, reflexes, spatial awareness, how to recover from a fall, physical skills such as how to swing a tennis racket or kick a football, etcetera.

This is the fun part!

You learn this by simply playing physical games. This can be an actual sport, or just challenging yourself to do some task in a physically challenging way.

Example

As kids, we’d usually play a game like that when walking somewhere. Because walking is boring. So you told each other: “don’t walk on the red tiles!” or “stay on that thin line on the crosswalk!”

Stupid challenges. But actually very demanding, physically. Usually, you fell a few times, but you learned from that and acquired better coordination.

Why is this overlooked? Because people don’t realize how useful it is. We are, generally, quite disconnected from our nature and our body. We think it’s completely normal to constantly tip over glasses, or stumble, or fail to catch something. Oh, we’re just “clumsy”, or whatever.

It’s not. Good coordination will prevent mistakes or dangerous situations, while making everything else easier.

Due to exercising my whole life, I have great reflexes and awereness. These have saved my life on numerous occasions.

Example

Once, I cycled behind a boy with a girl on the backside of his bike. A common sight in the Netherlands.

Suddenly, without any warning or sign, they stopped completely. This was a busy road. It was raining and dark. Two buses were racing past us.

I barely managed to break, turn, slide off to the side, regain my balance, and perfectly lean against a lantern. If I hadn’t done that, either I would have ended up in front of that bus, or I would have bumped them into the bus.

Meanwhile, most people don’t even know what a “tight turn” is or how to cycle in a straight line.

Yes, yes, I have cycled a lot in my life. That also increases my likelihood of being part of traffic accidents, I understand that.

Continue with this course