What do you count as exercise?

[irisfield]

Hello~

For those of you that have a goal each week/month for a certain number of minutes of exercise do you count stretching towards those minutes? I usually count if part of other exercise but yesterday that is all I did. Just curious.
Thanks,
Debbie
(also posted on VF)

 

[Shadowpup]

Hi Debbie,

I have different kinds of recording for different goals, two of them are activity and workouts. "Activity" is extra movement above my normal day that burn calories - includes things like chopping wood or shovelling snow. I don't include stretching there unless it is integrated, like a stretch between gardening stints. Fun biking goes here too, as opposed to a cardio-coached session. Under workouts, I include only sessions focused on a specific fitness goal. One of my goals involves flexibility, so I do include stretch-only sessions here, and maintain a count of how often I do them, whether they are dynamic or static, if my range of motion is improving, and so on. My stretch/flexibility/range of motion sessions come after some kind of a physical warmup, and I include those minutes too.

Being a measurement junkie, I've got quite a few other records too, from HRM and GoWearFit and so on, but I think these first two kinds are closest to what you're getting at.

Hope that helps, and Merry Christmas!

 

[RapidBreath]

Hi,

I think of cardio as a different category from strength and flexibility. For me, I use yoga to cover my strength and flexibility. I don't attempt to do both in the same session. I need a break I used to do a huge amount of cardio (6 hours/week) but then I got sick and couldn't do any for a while. Now, that I am able to do some cardio I've been aiming for 3 workouts per week and soon I will be upping that to 4. I do my yoga at night. There is nothing wrong with having just a stretching session. That helps prevent injury and moves fluid in and out of the muscle/joints. It can also help you sleep because you aren't hurting from overly tense muscles.

I count everything. I put it all into fitday. The yoga (or any other stretching program) doesn't burn as much calories but its just as important as cardio.