If exercise becomes one of your habits, it becomes automated. No longer do you have to engage in the daily internal dialogue of “Should I workout today?” Doing a workout is no longer on the table for discussion. It becomes habitual – you exercise every day. Daily physical activity isn’t a choice, it’s a requirement of healthy living.
Recently, Kaiser Permantente, the first healthcare provider in the world, declared exercise as a vital sign. That means that every time I go for a medical visit, the medical team records into my electronic records measurements such as my weight, blood pressure, and amount of exercise that I do daily. Daily physical activity is a vital sign and it is key to living a healthy and long life.
Each of us is a bundle of habits. You can choose to make daily physical activity especially HZT, Heart Zones Training one of those habits. If you do, I recommend that you follow the three simple and fun steps to the ZONING program and make ZONING an every day habit:
- 5-20-5 or 5 minutes of warm up 20 minutes in the easy blue or moderate yellow zone with 4 minutes of cool down,
- Change-it-Up or do different exercises every day and do them in different heart zones, and
- Blue-Yellow-Red or spend time based on how fit you are in each of the three different heart zones easy-moderate-hard.
In his best selling book, The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg explains that after decades of research, the process of forming and re-wiring the brain into creating positive habits called the “habit loop”, like ZONING, is a very simple three-step process.
- The Cue or triggering incident
- The Response or craving, and
- The Reward or prize that you get from the craving
Example. Possibly you have a habit of eating a piece of chocolate or craving it daily. The reward of doing daily exercise can be the high from the post-exercise feelings or it can be as simple as a piece of chocolate. Watch this video to see the relationship between exercise and chocolate:
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=wQLHwSphu-M&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwQLHwSphu-M
How to strengthen or renew your cardio-fitness habit? Make ZONING or HZT, Heart Zones Training one of your habits because the first step to living a healthy life is to move.
Sally Edwards
The Head Heart, Heart Zones USA
The Sally Edwards Company