My Journey With Health And Fitness – Time For Cross Training

Yet another freezing cold day here in Metro Vancouver and it is supposed to get really cold overnight. To make things even worse they are talking snow tomorrow. I’m not liking the early winter we are experiencing. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing we are less than a month away from heading south to the condo where I am pretty sure we won’t see any snow.

For a good year now my sister and I have been talking about getting a recumbent exercise bike. For me I figured it would be good to have something better to do besides walk on the treadmill when the weather is bad. For my sister it was attractive because of the neuropathy in her legs and even more so now as she continues to recover from the bad break in her leg from last spring. Unfortunately a decent recumbent bike is quite expensive but we have continued watching for one to be on sale. Then last week one of the seniors in my walking group mentioned she had a used recumbent she really wanted to get rid of. She sent me the specs and it was a 2006 model that she wanted to basically give away so I thought I might as well take it and use it until I found a new one that I could afford.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that while the bike was 16 years only it was a top of the line model and had barely been used. It has all sorts of different workouts from interval training and sprinting to heart rate targeted programs. It is relatively comfortable to use and all that is needed is finding a way to set up an iPad holder on it (note, there is no indoor exercise that happens without my iPad). I have a feeling I’ll be using this bike for a long time.

Yesterday I decided it was time to start some cross training. Since I got the new treadmill most days I have been doing 2 hours of walking. I’ve decided that for my 2nd workout each day that I am going to do 30 minutes on the bike then 30 minutes on the treadmill. Yesterday I did a fat burn program on the bike and I quickly realized that I was using my muscles in a totally different way. They complained a bit but not enough to deter me. Today I switched it up to an interval program and tomorrow I plan to try sprinting.

I get the feeling I’m eventually going to be doing 1 hour of walking and 1 hour of biking each day. Cross training might work out well for me.