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Internet groups are especially helpful for home exercisers. “People who exer-

cise at home don’t have the social benefit that you can get at a health club,

and in many cases, they don’t have any friends or family who exercise,” says

Wendy Niemi Kremer, founder of Video Fitness (www.videofitness.com), a

Web site for exercise video enthusiasts. (See Chapter 19 for more details about

the site.) “Video Fitness has become an enormous support group. When any

crisis in your life can derail your exercise program, it’s nice to have some-

where to go.”

Test Your Fitness Regularly

Sure, exercise gives you intangible benefits like more energy and greater self-

esteem. But it also helps to translate your progress into raw numbers: how

many pounds you can bench-press, how many beats your resting heart rate

has dropped, how fast you can run a mile, how much body fat you’ve lost.

(We explain all these tests in Chapter 2.) Track these numbers in a workout

log or notebook (see Chapter 3) so that you can keep track of your progress

over time.

For your first year that you work out regularly, you may want to get tested

every three months. (You make the most noticeable improvements when you

first start exercising; then progress becomes less dramatic.) After the first

year, we suggest getting tested every six months. If you don’t want to spend

the time or money on a whole battery of tests, ask a certified trainer to do the

part you find most motivating, such as a body-fat test or blood-pressure read-

ing. A heart-rate monitor can be useful for the do-it-yourself tests that we

describe in Chapters 2 and 8.

If you’re training for a specific event, you may want to do a time trial once a

month. For example, if your goal is to walk a mile in a certain amount of time,

break out your stopwatch once a month and go all out. If you train properly,

each time you test yourself you’ll move a bit closer to your goal.

Mix Up Your Workouts

Some people thrive on routine. Suzanne bicycles with a 67-year-old retired

racer named Barry who has been riding the exact same route on Saturdays

for 41 years. Much to the frustration of his wife, Barry refuses to take non-

cycling vacations, because he doesn’t want to miss his daily ride.

Most of us, however, need a bit of variety to stay motivated. For this reason,

you may want to try cross-training,which simply means mixing up your activi-

ties. Cross-training means different things to different people. You can vary

382 Part VIII: The Part of Tens