How to Start with Fitness
The first part of this page is the short read which is really only the method. The second is the long read which will help your understanding more and may lead to better results than merely following the method. There is a parkour context for starting fitness at the end.
The Short
You must develop your aerobic energy system (fat burning) before doing any other activity. The following is a rough guideline that should see some great results over 3 to 6 months:
- Get a heart rate monitor that has a chest sensor to continuously send your heart-rate to a watch display, e.g. from here
- From the number 180 take away your age and then take away 10 (or 15 if you know you can’t run more than a few steps). Remember this number (you can work out the number in better detail here - I have approximated these instructions for ease of use and to suit the average person slightly better)
- Get dressed for being comfortable while active and go outside wearing your heart rate monitor.
- Start walking and as you feel more comfortable increase your pace until you are running.
- No matter what, you must keep your heart rate at, or just below the number you remembered from point 2. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP!
- For the last 15 minutes of your time exercising, decrease your pace until you are walking slowly and comfortably.
It may be very, very hard to keep your pace slow enough to maintain your heart-rate at a low pace, but this is essential for this to work and it will get easier. As your aerobic system develops, you will be able to go faster at the same heart-rate. This is your measure of improvement and you can time yourself to run/walk 1km during the middle of your exercise while maintaining this heart-rate. Your time should gradually decrease over the 3 to 6 month period.
The Long
More and more I am coming to realise the importance of health when it comes to fitness. If you are getting fitter, but not maintaining health, then this is not sustainable fitness. Injury or lifestyle-altering discomfort is inevitable when someone gets fitter without consideration to their health. Nutrition is the first step to health. Building your aerobic energy system is the second step. There are a few other steps, such as dealing with stress through becoming consciously aware of your values and how they affect decisions, and sorting out any sleep issues you might suffer from. Music can help too.
This section will focus on building your aerobic energy system as this relates more to what people consider as “fitness” while also building the necessary healthy lifestyle.
Here’s the reality of things. If you get faster and faster at running, even over short distances, or can jump higher than you have ever jumped before, you may still find aches and pains are creeping up on you. As a parkour practitioner of about 5 years, and before that a bit of a gym junkie and 10km plodder/runner, and before that a rock-climber of 7 years (including 3 years as an instructor), and before that about 10 years of rugby in the front row of a scrum; as all of that, and what some would consider rather fit and experienced at physical activity, I am finding that no matter how much I rest between efforts, it is all but impossible to do away with the aches and irritants that affect my sporting endeavours.
Recently, I’ve been getting stuck into a book by Dr. Phil Maffetone called “The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing”. This has shown me that I have an imbalance between my anaerobic and aerobic energy systems.
As I understand it, the anaerobic energy system provides shorter term, intense, energy to the body for the types of activities that are also intense, e.g. jumping, sprinting, parkour-type, rock-climbing (especially on overhangs as was my habit), rubgy, etc. Unfortunately, with this type of activity, and with the frequent use of the anaerobic energy system (which is sugar fuelled), comes a lot of inflammation. This inflammation is necessary to help the body recover from these intense uses of muscle/energy. The unfortunate part is that this inflammation needs to come down eventually, and that is a part of the role of the aerobic energy system. If the aerobic energy system is undeveloped, the inflammation lasts too long. If this inflammation lasts too long, it becomes a source of aches and pains that can severely affect your lifestyle.
In my case, limiting the amount of training that I can do.
With the last dozen years or so of almost solely anaerobic exercise, I am finding it very hard to recover after even short though highly intense activity. Even reducing the amount of work done during parkour training and focusing more on running and high repetitions of body-weight exercises, I am finding that there are still aches and muscle imbalances. I want to sort these things out, so I have been doing this research and have begun to test myself. The answer seems clear: develop your aerobic energy system and cease training anaerobically until the balance has been restored.
The aerobic energy system is a fat-burning, long-term, endurance-type energy system. If you run a marathon, or longer, e.g. ultra-marathon, then this is the the energy source you use. The aerobic energy system is not only used during these long endurance efforts, but also when recovering from anaerobic activity or helping you to stay fit, energetic, and healthy for everyday activity.
The first thing to do is to identify what sort of training will help to improve the aerobic energy system. Dr. Phil has already done this for us. The biggest idea is that any activity performed at, or close to, your maximum aerobic heart rate will do the trick. Running, cycling, swimming, walking, or anything that allows you to raise your heart rate gradually and maintain it at the desired level for an extended period of time. Parkour is not a good activity for this!
Here are the same steps from above but with a few additional points of commentary where relevant.
How to increase your aerobic ability:
- Get a heart rate monitor that has a chest sensor to continuously send your heart rate to a watch display, e.g. from here, this provides an easy way to monitor your heart rate during activity. Other methods, such as counting from your pulse, are just not as reliable.
- From the number 180 take away your age and then take away 10 (or 15 if you know you can’t run more than a few steps). Remember this number (you can work out the number in better detail here - I have approximated these instructions for ease of use and to suit the average person slightly better). If you are already quite fit, are on medication, or get sick frequently, then you might like to read more to get the closest approximation for your maximum aerobic heart rate.
- Get dressed for being comfortable while active and go outside wearing your heart rate monitor.
- Start walking and as you feel more comfortable increase your pace until you are running.
- No matter what, you must keep your heart rate at, or just below the number you remembered from point 2. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP!
- For the last 15 minutes of your time exercising, decrease your pace until you are walking slowly and comfortably.
An example of this process:
I am 30 years old so I will take 30 from 180 to get 150 beats per minute. Then, because I haven’t trained quite as regularly as I would like over the last two years, I will take an additional 5 beats from this to arrive at 145 beats per minute.
I will head out the door and begin by walking slowly but increasing my pace until I am walking briskly but comfortably over a period of about 5 minutes while watching my heart rate creep up. Then, I will break into a slow shuffle where I am barely out of a slightly over balanced walk and into the lightest of jogging motion. This should see a quick jump in my heart rate during the transition so I will maintain this pace for about 5 minutes or more until it becomes comfortable.
At this point, I may find that I’ve already reached my heart rate goal, in which case I will stay at this pace for all but the last 15 minutes of my run, at which point I will drop out of a run and walk briskly for about 5 to 10 minutes before slowing to an easy pace for the last 5.
If I need to increase my pace to reach the 145 beats per minute goal, then I will do so as gradually as I can and then maintain my pace to stay at, or slightly below, this figure. The last 15 minutes will be used to slow down until a slow pace is again achieved.
I’ve found it quite difficult to maintain my pace at that exact level but the best advice is to give yourself a range of 10 beats per minute to try and stay within. For me, I will aim to stay between 135 and 145 beats per minute. The closer to the 145 I stay, the faster the results.
The same advice from earlier: It may be very, very hard to keep your pace slow enough to maintain your heart-rate at a low pace, but this is essential for this to work and it will get easier. As your aerobic system develops, you will be able to go faster at the same heart-rate. This is your measure of improvement and you can time yourself to run/walk 1km during the middle of your exercise while maintaining this heart-rate. Your time should gradually decrease over the 3 to 6 month period.
Concluding and a parkour context
So there you have it. The best way to start with fitness is to build your aerobic energy system using a heart rate monitor. This will result in more energy and better recovery from anaerobic training.
If you train anaerobically regularly, e.g. during parkour, it would be good to seasonalise your parkour training so that you can spend a good portion of the year building your aerobic base. While you can train a bit of both aerobic and anaerobic in any given week, the effects of building an aerobic base will be better if you drastically limit your anaerobic training.
The biggest issue for parkour practitioners will be the impatience in having to stop for a few months ever year (or half year) to maintain an injury free body.
Because the attraction of parkour is in learning new movement, I doubt that it is practical to get newbies to stay away from the anaerobic aspects because all they will be doing is jogging slowly for a few months. Instead, I would recommend that coaches or instructors of parkour would spend time focusing on running technique and easier forms of body-weight exercises at least once a week. Also, they should severely limit the amount of repetitions of those they are instructing. A good measure is to observe the participants carefully for signs of weariness during and near the end of training. Any sign that they are requiring more rest, finishing with low energy or high muscular pain, should result in decreased repetitions of exercises. It is a myth that you have to work hard and feel stuffed to make gains.
Ideally, practitioners would spend 3 to 6 months building their aerobic base and then another 3 to 6 months building strength using basic body-weight exercises (push ups, pull ups, squats) before starting actual parkour techniques. Realistically, 6 to 12 months before starting the “fun parts” is not going to happen. Instead, it would seem wise to focus on the basics for the initial months while maintaining standards of training intensity that minimise over-training. As aches begin developing (which will take longer for some) insist upon taking a few months off to build the aerobic base to prevent chronic injury.
With constantly being aware of one’s body state, and maturely deciding to revert training to aerobic building as aches appear, the parkour practitioner should be able to develop strategies for dealing with the reality of physical limitations and the reality of human motivation. Advanced practitioners should be able to seasonalise their training to incorporate aerobic building.