Friday, January 2, 2009

January 2009: Regular Exercise

Happy New Year!

In my job as a GP I frequently encourage patients to exercise regularly. And although I am sure I am giving them good advice I feel like such a hypocrite as I have been very sporadic with exercise for most of my adult life. So I have decided this year that I want to make it a habit to exercise at least 3 timers per week. I am not going to call this a "New Years Resolution" - because New Years Resolutions seem rather prone to being broken!

To give myself a kick start my challenge for this month is to exercise at least 4 times per week, for at least 20 minutes. Hopefully if I can exercise at least 4 times per week for the month of January it will help me be motivated enough to keep up with exercising regularly from now on.

I want to examine some of the evidence for the benefits of exercise. I think this will help to keep me motivated. I also want to collate it into a simple handout with some tips that I can give to patients. Actually, I guess that a number of pamphlets like this already exists that will make my job a little easier.

Well off to hop on the treadmill. Believe it or not it is a little too warm for me to run comfortably outside today. Yes, I have certainly acclimatised to the local weather. Who would have thought that after growing up in Perth I would ever call 25 degrees hot!


PS - I finished my second book in my December read-a-thon challenge. I only read half as many as I had aimed to, but twice as many as David had predicted. :)

4 comments:

deejay said...

Hi. Nice to know another GP from other country. I'm from Malaysia and working as a GP too.

Anonymous said...

Hi Mand
go the non "new years resolution" resolution! At least the girls in the family are working our way to a happy and healthy "old people" age :) I have gone the new hair cut, gym membership and day care for Adam to give me a fresh new start to the year to try and get everything into focus properly ... hopefully I will achieve my goal to be a little bit better (if not a lot) in all the roles I play: Wife, Mother, Sister, Christian Witness, Friend, Sexy Lady :) he he anyway I think if we both keep "checking up" on each other we shall both have a great year
love ya heaps
Beks

Andrew and Alice Brown said...

have you thought about adding small weights to your regime? they are pretty easy to do because you don't have to leave your lounge, and the results come quickly and last.. a good compliment to cardio fitness. not that I assume you don't know this, but for some reason it doesn't seem to occur to women to do weights..

here's a link:
http://www.stumptuous.com/cms/

-andrew

Mandy said...

Hi Deejay, I have visited your blog. Interesting that despite the difference of country/culture so many aspects of our jobs are the same.

Bek: you go girl! Love you too and love the new "do". xxx

Andrew: funnily enough I fave a few sore muscles right now from using hand weights 2 days ago. But the home page of the site you linked to says: "these guerilla grrrls of the gym are tossing aside the tyranny of the tiny pink weights", and ironically I have been using tiny pink weights!