Day 4: Exercise Tolerance Awareness and Measurement
Before we can begin our cardio journey, there are three important concepts I need to teach you about:
Exercise Tolerance
Exercise Intolerance
Your Cardio Baseline
Exercise tolerance is the amount of exercise our body can handle without consequence.
Exercise intolerance happens when we exceed the amount of exercise tolerance we have. Our bodies become intolerant, and we have an exercise induced symptom flare-up, which can result symptoms such as exhaustion, muscle aches, flu-like symptoms, nausea, dizziness, insomnia, and more.
And your cardio baseline is the difference between the two!
So it is essential that we find your cardio baseline- which is how much exercise you can tolerate without going into exercise intolerance mode (which then puts you at risk for flare-up). The cardio baseline will give us information to help personalize this process for you and your body.
One of the easiest ways to find the cardio baseline is to collect data, and match it against your mental check-in that we practiced. This will help us figure out how much is just enough and how much is too much.
Today, we are going to begin learning how to find your cardio baseline, using A step counter.
Wear your step counter for your full day and track how many steps you take. No exercise, just your basic daily activity level. Don’t try to do more than usual. We want to measure a normal day. At the end of the day, write this number down somewhere so you can refer to it later. Learn more about step counters here.
We are going to track your daily steps for a few days, and then use this number as a starting off point for our cardio exercise.
And… don’t forget to keep practicing your deep breathing!
You can post your step counter experience on Facebook or tell me about it here…