You’ve come to grips what the fact that you need to lose some weight and exercise on a regular basis for your heart, but you haven’t quite decided what exercise is right for you. You’ve considered joining a gym or buying exercise equipment for your home but the cost and the thought of traveling to and from the gym isn’t appealing and you’ve tried exercising on expensive home equipment before and quit out of boredom. This time needs to be different. You need to find an exercise that you will stick with for your health. Have you considered jogging? Let’s look at some of the benefits of becoming a jogger and how you go about becoming a jogger.

First of all, jogging is practical. It doesn’t require any equipment except for a pair of running shoes. No time spent going back and forth to the gym and no high membership fees. In a nutshell, jogging is inexpensive.

You can change up the route you take each day so you don’t get bored going through the same motions over and over every day. Instead of walking on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike in your bedroom, looking at the same wall or trying to watch a TV program that you can’t hear while exercising, you could be outdoors in the fresh air. After being cooped up in the house or an office all day the feeling of freedom and being out in nature is what keeps many people jogging.

Probably the best thing about jogging is that anybody can do it. Depending on your fitness level or lack there of, you may not be able to start out with a full jog, but everyone can start out walking, gradually working their way up to jogging for increasingly longer distances.

As with anything you start, you need a plan. Before you begin your jogging program, stop and think about what your goals are. Are you trying to burn more calories for weight loss? Do you want to build stronger muscles? Are you trying to get your heart healthier? Do you want to be able to run long distances, perhaps even a marathon one day?

The amount of time you spend running as well as how you run all depend on your goals. If endurance is your goal, you will need to put in a lot of time. You will start out walking, working your way up to a full jog, and then increasing your speed and finally, your distance. If you have your sights set on running a marathon one day, it isn’t unrealistic to run 5km per day.

If calorie burning is your goal, you need to run on a regular basis but keep a measured pace. By jogging at a steady pace, your running remains aerobic, and it burns calories which results in burning fat. Aerobic exercise is the only way to burn fat, so if this is your goal, you’re on the right track.

For improving your lifestyle and becoming healthier, start out with a 15 to 30 minute brisk walk. Continue walking every day until it becomes easy to you. Once the brisk walking is easy, start alternating jogging with your walking. Finally, when the walking and jogging combination has become too easy, you are ready to jog the entire 15 to 30 minutes. This is great exercise for strengthening your heart.

As you can see, jogging is the perfect exercise. It doesn’t take expensive equipment, you don’t waste valuable time commuting to the gym after a long day at work, and you can adjust your jogging workout to fit your fitness goals. What are you waiting for? Go get those jogging shoes on and get started.

Jason Ladock

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