Benefits of Cross-Training

Perhaps the best general approach is to "cross-train"; that is, to combine several activities into your daily or weekly exercise routine. Cross-training has many benefits:

Total-body fitness: With the possible exception of activities such as rowing and Nordic skiing, no single sport will provide a total-body workout. A steady diet of walking or running is great for the legs, great for the cardiovascular system, and certainly beneficial for overall health but doesn't do much for the arms, for example. Swimming is great for the upper body but doesn't have much to offer the lower body. Put walking or running together with swimming, however, or swimming with cycling, and you're working all of the body's major muscle groups for optimal health and greatly improved overall muscular fitness.

Improved cardiovascular fitness: Cross-training allows you to tax your cardiovascular system more thoroughly than is likely with any single activity, and do it with less risk of injury. For example, you can walk or jog only a certain amount of time before your legs get tired and your feet start to complain. But you could run until your feet tell you you've had enough, then hop on your bike or into the pool and continue to exercise your cardiovascular system while "resting" the muscles you used while walking or running. This is a particularly effective way of exercising for those of us plagued by old injuries or arthritic problems.

Injury prevention: Cross-training helps prevent injuries in several ways. First, by cross-training, you're spreading the physical stress of exercise over a greater area of the body, so you're less likely to overwork any single joint, muscle, or muscle group. For example, suppose you walk briskly for 30 minutes, three times a week; you'll gain all the health benefits provided by this type of activity, but if you're particularly heavy, or have some inherent weaknesses in your knees or feet, then a steady diet of walking could lead to injury, or at least to overtraining or discouragement. If you walked one day, cycled the second, and swam the third, however, you'd still be gaining the significant health benefits of aerobic activity but with much less chance of injury. Cross-training also helps prevent the muscle strength imbalances that can develop from single sports; for example, combining walking or jogging with cycling develops more balance between the muscles of the front and back of the legs.

Increased variety: Cross-training provides more training opportunities and more variety, helping to combat boredom or burnout. One symptom of overtraining, and perhaps one of the earliest, is a loss of interest in exercise. That loss of interest not only means that you may be bored, but that you may be pushing your body's limits. If you're bored with walking, however, you might find new incentives in swimming or cycling while giving your feet a rest. Likewise, when the weather is too raw to walk, you can always swim, if there's an indoor pool handy, or take an aerobics class or do some weight training. If the weather's too cold to swim, perhaps you can walk. And so on.

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