Starting training from scratch...
Good health can only depend on factors such as: a balanced diet (made up of all the fundamental elements of nutrition) and good rest. You can't, in fact, expect to cope with long hikes at the weekend and follow a sedentary lifestyle for the rest of the week.
After consulting your GP and establishing that you can do sport (and above all establishing that you can do all those aerobic-type physical activities), the simplest thing to do is precisely to start with slow running.
Training and health
We know well that sports training is useful for anyone and at any age.
You shouldn't underestimate the power of sport from the point of view of mental well-being. With a few days of running a week you can let off stress and frustration as in no other way...
When you start following regular training you discover how fragile your body can be. With a few hundred metres of running every day, slight muscle soreness, joint pain, tiredness and breathlessness will begin to appear. However, as you keep training, every little ache will begin to disappear. This happens thanks to the body's capacity for physiological adaptation and to the capacity of the individual mechanical parts to develop ever greater resistance.
All this takes a certain effort, but despite everything the results, especially in the long term, can give great satisfaction: greater mental and psychological clarity, an inner calm, psychological balance and of course a fitter body.
Those who have led a mainly sedentary life will have to start practically from zero. The first obstacles are essentially psychological: laziness, work stress, inability to organise training. Only those who are strongly motivated will be able to overcome all this, and will certainly manage to combine normal daily activities with sport.
Sports preparation for the mountains
Good training can last as long as six months. To climb height gains of over 1000 metres without effort on snowy terrain you need reasonable fitness. Fitness of this kind can be reached (alas) in three months of steady training. Any other way of approaching the winter mountains is a gamble and just a way of getting hurt.
Sample running training plan:
- Weeks I - II: 2 times x 10 minutes of slow running.
- Weeks III - IV: 3 times x 10 minutes of slow running.
- Weeks V - VI: 3 times x 15 minutes of slow running.
- Weeks VII - VIII: 3 times x 20 minutes of slow running.
As the minutes of running increase, various problems start to arise:
1) Fitting it in with working hours and the timetable of daily life;
2) The boredom of always running the same route;
3) Low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia);
4) The stress on the knee and hip joints.
One piece of advice is naturally to change route often
perhaps choosing, if possible, routes with ups and downs.
As for fitting sport into the normal activities of daily life, it will be useful, for example, to go from 3 to 4 days of activity a week.
The best time for running is clearly before going for lunch. If it isn't possible at lunchtime, always prefer the morning rather than the evening, when you are tired and concentration is poor. The important thing is to have had a good snack mid-morning, so as to have an empty stomach and blood full of sugars. It isn't easy to identify (to feel it in your body) the blood-sugar level that gives the best sports performance. In any case, with time and the right sensitivity you can achieve excellent results.
As for hypoglycaemia, one option is to have your meals at least three hours before the time you do physical activity. If you have chosen early morning, clearly your performance can't be excellent, because the muscles will quickly use up the few sugars present in the blood. Bear in mind, in fact, that during the night the blood tends to go into a hypoglycaemic state.
With slow running done 2-3 times a week you develop good endurance; however, it is definitely useful to alternate other physical activities such as cycling and those proprioceptive skills, that is, those activities that allow you to develop balance, sense of direction, reflexes, sensitivity to the position of the limbs, respectively: the feet, the arms, etc...