How to increase your endurance

To have enough energy to get through the day without feeling tired and spent, you need to build your physical endurance. How do you accomplish this? By simply using your body in a more active way each day.

• You want to do 300 to 400 calories of exercise. The first step? Take a step -- walk more! You could do this on a treadmill, but the easiest way to do more walking is to strap on a step-measuring pedometer and measure the number of steps that you take as you go about your daily living. Increase as necessary to reach your goal. The goal? 10,000 steps a day. That's roughly the equivalent of about 4+ miles a day. Or, approximately that 400 calories per day you're trying to achieve!

• Another way to get there? 30 to 45 minutes of dancing! Plug in those ipod-nano ear-buds and have fun boogying around the house every day.

• Biking, hiking, swimming, walking up and down flights of stairs at work, walking the halls at the malls, getting off the train or bus stop before yours and walking the rest of the way, parking at the far end of the parking lot. ANY way that you can increase your activity will increase your energy and endurance.

Hi, I’m Dr. Pam Peeke. Do you have enough energy and endurance to get through the day? Bet you don’t. So what’s the solution? We’ve got to use that magnificent body of yours to be able to get it. What do you do specifically? Well the first step is: take a step. The easiest thing anybody could do is get up and walk more all through the day. Now you can hop on a treadmill or you can basically break it up all through the day in activities of daily living.  Now what are we aiming for here? We’re aiming to burn three or four hundred calories total. Now how do you do that with a busy life? Well you strap on a pedometer and just increase the number of steps you take everyday. What’s the goal? Ten thousand steps a day, which is roughly equivalent to four miles and some change, or about four hundred calories. There you have it. How easy was that? The key here is to build endurance and energy by using the body. When you’re sedentary, doesn’t happen. What else can you do? Have fun. How about dancing? Thirty to forty-five minutes of plugging in that nano-pod and just dancing by yourself works perfectly fine. You want to do this every single day. What else can you do? So many other things. Biking, swimming, what I’m saying is: increase your activity and you’ll increase that energy and endurance.