Fitness Challenge
This is one of the most difficult of the challenge badges and is required if any scout wants to attain the Chief Scout's Gold Award.
This year we're trying out a brand new excercise technique which involves only 4 mins of excercise, three times a week. The excercise consists of the following:
1. 30 seconds of pushing yourself in an excercise or your choice, but to the absolute max. You should aim to push yourself to the limit, but only for 30 seconds.
2. 30 seconds of calm excercise, like gentle walking. Concentrate on your breathing taking full deep breaths (in through your nose and out through your mouth).
3. repeat steps 1 & 2 four times.
The MP3 track at the end of the article is a piece of music consisting of 8 sections of music; 4 very fast sections (for step one) and 4 slow sections inbetween. A series of short beeps leading to one big beep denotes the start or each section.
At the end of excercise take time to calm down and breathe properly. If you can, measure how long it takes for your breath and pulse to return to normal. The more excercise you do the faster you should recover.
Heathly Eating
A long with excercise it is important that you eat heathily. There is no point in doing excercises if you go out afterwards and buy yourself a Mars bar (or chocolate bar of your choice).
Along with excercise, aim to eat healthily at least 3 days a week. Make a note of when you beat temptation and choose the healthy option; an apple instead of sweets, or water instead of a fizzy (or sugary) drink.
Results
Although you're only required to do this for 6 weeks, I urge you to carry on afterwards. This technique is shown to improve fitness in as little as 6 weeks.
Don't forget if you want a six pack you're going to need to add to these excercises. Consider doing some sit ups or weight training to tone muscles (but don't push yourself too hard).
Excercise Music: right click here and choose "save link as" to store it on your computer. Move it to your phone or MP3 player from there.
