Physical Activity vs Exercise
Exercise vs Physical Activity – Do you know the difference? And are you doing enough for you and your goals / lifestyle?
Usually the conversations go like this…
ME: “So Jeff, what we’re doing in the gym is great, but we need to do a bit more exercise outside of the gym, what do you do when you’re not with me?”
JEFF: “Well, I already walk around a lot at work and garden on the weekends, that’s heaps of exercise.”
Unfortunately for Jeff, it is not the same.
By definition; exercise is a planned, structured, intentional movement for a specific goal, typically related to health and fitness.
Physical activity on the other hand is any movement made by the body/muscles that requires energy, i.e. gardening, house work, shopping etc.
You see, physical activity (PA) is things you commonly do every day, or every week; housework, shopping or walking the dog. Your body gets use to it, and although it’s good movement, it’s not exercise.
As we mentioned, exercise is a planned, structured program targeting a health and/or fitness goal. It is planned and structured to allow for progressive overload and progression to continue increasing and getting better.
With the example of strength, progressively increasing the weight on the bar for a squat by 2.5kg each week for an 8-week program will see continued progressive overload, forcing the body to adapt, rebuild and get stronger and your strength going from 60kg à 80kg over 8-weeks.
A good exercise program and plan won’t be this simple, and it can be hard to track all of the measurements over time, but hey, I guess that’s why I have a job right? But here are some simple steps YOU can take to ensure you continue to progress in the gym or at home.
Progressive overload: Each week, you can do either one of these things to ensure safe progress, for both the weights and cardio.
• Weights session 3 sets of 10 reps: each week, keeping the same weight, increase the repetitions buy 2 until you reach 16. Then increase the weight a bit and return back to 3x10.
• Walking for weight loss: walk 15min 3x a week, each week increase it by 5min. Then after 4-weeks of this, add another day, and another there after every 2-weeks until you’re walking every day for 40-60min.
This gives you a bit more of an idea between the difference of PA and Exercise in hopes that if you have some fitness goals, you can plan and schedule your exercise to suit and help reach your goals, whatever they may be. And if you’re having trouble with it, you can always swing me a message and I would be glad to help you out.
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