Get FITT

Being FITT is extremely important - what's more important is understanding your limitations and knowing how to properly exercise for your body. FITT is an acronym that is widely known amongst exercise professionals (thanks, ACSM!) and is extremely helpful while planning your program.

Three steps to follow while creating your program:

Warm up - warming up is important in order to get the blood flowing, to increase the internal temperature of the body & should be done between 3 & 5 minutes. To get in a good warm up, walking or dynamic stretching would be an affective way of accomplishing the increase of blood flow and temp.

FITT - Frequency should be carefully chosen to prevent an individual from over exercising. Exercising too often could cause injury or burn out. Intensity is important, especially for de-conditioned individuals and those who suffer from disease (we will get into that later). Time should be tracked during exercise to ensure that you are meeting ACSM's standards for a healthy person. These times have been put into place because they have proven to decrease the prevalence of disease. Changing the Type of exercise will keep it interesting and gives the opportunity for the individual to find exercise that they truly enjoy.

Cool Down - Most people skip out on this one without realizing its importance. After exercise, the body needs to have a chance to "calm down". During the cool down the internal temperature and respiratory rate needs a chance to decrease while the heart rate needs a chance to slow down. Without that happening, the body is working harder to get blood flowing to the contracting muscle. If the blood flow no longer has that contracted muscle to go to dizzy spells could occur. An effective cool down would consist of walking, stretching or laying horizontally. The reason why laying horizontally works is because the blood can flow freely. When standing, it's important to keep the muscles in your legs contracting so that the blood flow can be pushed back towards the heart, otherwise the blood would pool in the legs and flow to the rest of the body is minimized.