Back in the Jogging Rhythm

With spring and summer and all the awesome warm weather it bring (excluding the typhoons, humidity and numerous creepy crawly insects everywhere) it’s finally become possible for me to put on my running shoes and hit the road on a daily basis.

Living in Kagoshima I was lucky that there was hardly any snow during winter and even though it was freezing cold I could still go jogging as long as I was warmly dressed. Nagano has been a whole different beast to tackle in winter though. The snow here is almost constant in winter which means that every road and sidewalk turns jogging into a circus act featuring me as a rather clumsy clown sliding past everyone and frantically trying to grab the nearest light pole.

This mean that most of the past winter I would usually get home and hide myself under my kotatsu to try and survive rather than brave the weather and go jogging. I did try and break my inactivity addiction by purchasing an exercise bike and using it on and off but no matter what I tried, my kotatsu was always there tempting me.

So now that the temperatures are in the 20’s I’ve started jogging on a nearly daily basis to try and make the most of the time from May until November. So far it’s been rather awesome and I feel a lot better than I did when I would just veg out in the evenings. I’ve definitely lost the rhythm I was in when I was running a year or so ago and I need to try and get back into it.

One technique I want to look at for my running is try and make use of heart zone training. At it’s simplest this means that you are targeting a certain heart zone for your run which will target either fat burn or endurance. So rather than leisurely jogging or running flat out you can target exactly what effect you want your run to have and then make sure that you’re achieving your fitness goal.

To try and track my weight and whether my jogging is actually having a positive effect on my health I’ve started using PopWeight to chart my health, body fat percentage and BMI and Carrot Fit to put some fun into any additional workouts I do. The cool thing is that both of these feed into Apple Health which gives me a nice overview of all the various health stats I track across several other apps as well. Paired with an activity tracker such as the Jawbone Up24 it’s a fantastic way for you to get an overall picture of your health and it’s helped me focus on some areas I need to improve on if I want to stay healthy.

So if you’re like me and want to try and get rid of all that extra food you ate to try and survive through winter then there’s no better time than now to head out and hit the road for a good bit of exercise!

• Personal