Whether you walk or run for fitness, working out consistently is the key to staying in shape, loosing weight or maintaining general fitness over a long period of time.

Too many times, many athletes, recreational and elite alike, try to reach their fitness goals too fast by working out way too much without taking a rest day or two to refresh the body. This added stress can lead to injury or sometimes worse than injury, mental fatigue which is also known as burn out.

When designing a fitness program, adequate rest and recovery days should be built into the schedule. I usually recommend that new walkers and runners start by working out three to four times a week at most. As they get fitter and stronger, another day can be added and beyond that when a fifth day is added I suggest adding an active recovery workout instead of a full workout. They key is to manage the stresses placed on the body so that consistency can be maintained.

There is a lot of research that has gone into finding out whether rest days actually benefit you more than an active day. Without referencing any particular research piece, I think I safely claim that taking a few rest days each week when you are working out consistency will help you more than if you were to have worked out. We all know the body needs rest after stress that is why we sleep at night. This is that forced time where the body just shuts down and in the morning you are generally much stronger than when you first went to sleep.

If we take this to training programs, when you have worked out for a period and then take another period to rest and recover, the next period you should be a lot stronger than when you first began. This is because the body has recovered from the training and in recovering also adapted to the training, making you a lot stronger.

When we talk about consistency, what we are wanting to achieve is that for prolonged periods, such as months to even years, that you work out three to four times each week for approximately 20 to 30 minutes each time. Working out consistency as defined will ensure to a great degree in avoiding injury and illness.

Staying disciplined in your program and not doing too much can be really tough for many people, this is very natural. We all want to do more to get to our goal faster. This is where you need to have a training program built that provides the guidance necessary to keep on track.