Just as I did in last year’s ‘Lifting Your Game’ training program for casual joggers, this training program is also broken into three stages.
Conditioning yourself into a training routine
The aim of the first 3 weeks of this program is to ease you into a regular exercise routine. If you haven’t done much physical activity and you are carrying a fair amount of weight, you shouldn’t do any jogging. Your body simply won’t be won’t be used to the activity.
In our modern lifestyles, most of us don’t do anywhere near enough activity each day to burn off the kilojoules (calories) we consume. Most of us are overweight and if you are overweight and you start jogging, you will put a lot of strain on the muscles and joints in the body that could do more damage than good.
Objectives for the first 3-4 weeks
The most important thing to remember at this stage of your conditioning is not to use more exertion than about 75% of your maximum effort.
This part of the program is aimed at helping to ease you into increasing in your aerobic capacity and your endurance.
Three things you must do:
- Lose those extra kilos. You don’t want to be carrying extra weight for 14km do you? If you are 40kg overweight, go to the gym and pick up two 20kg weights ‘? now imagine carrying these to the finish line? It isn’t really what you want to do is it? If you eat correctly and follow this training routine, you will lose 5 to 10kg before the City2Surf. You don’t want to aim to lose more than that. Healthy weight loss is around 750gsm per week.
- Focus on eliminating ALL bad foods from your diet. You have probably heard it all dozens of times before, so I won’t harp on about it other than to say ‘you are what you eat’.
If you want to improve your life, you will focus on your diet.
There is a good article on this healthy eating on this site titled ‘Simple Rules for Healthy Eating‘ but everyone’s circumstances are different, so please consult a dietician.
If you know what you should be eating but you are still having trouble, please contact me in my professional capacity and we can have a look at your lifestyle design and work out how to change some of those bad habits. - Regular exercise. You will need to exercise every day. Please follow the weekly exercise plan and don’t forget to drink plenty of water.
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April 2013 Update
My City2Surf training program is now available as an eBook via all leading online bookstores and I also invite you to join me in my free Facebook training group the City2Surf 100 day Challenge.