Just 30 minutes of walking today, including the warm-up and cool-down bits — and I see that the same walk is on my Prevention.com walking for weight loss calendar for tomorrow as well… and then again later in the week.
This is strange.
Wouldn’t you think, here in the third week of the program, that we’d be asked to really rev up the effort?
To be honest, looking ahead over the calendar… I’m pretty sure that someone at Prevention has made a mistake!
See, this is why the world needs its persnickety editors.
But I digress…
5 minute warm-up
20 minutes walk at level 6
5 minute cool-down
stretching
As I say, I’m pretty sure that the Prevention.com site has the exercise program for this week all mixed up, but never mind — I’m going to follow it anyway.
Exactly as written.
To the letter.
Why?
Because one of the best motivators for success in any exercise program is structure, because structure helps to bolster the self-discipline we need to see a difficult task through in the long term.
Here, that structure is provided by the 4-Week Walk for Weight Loss exactly as it is set out in Prevention.com’s personalized exercise calendar.
To start “second-guessing” the program at this point would, effectively, give me “permission” to rewrite it, to slack off, to skip a day, to rearrange the program so that I’m doing more of the distance walks that I enjoy and fewer of the challenging interval walks that (if jelly-like legs, heaving chest and sweaty brow are anything to go by) are what my body most need to be doing…
I know my own weakness.
I know that I need structure to keep me on track.
And so far, following this walking program has done a good job of getting me up off my chair and away from the computer, out into the real world to burn off some calories and firm up the muscles.
If it ain’t broke, as they say, don’t fix it!