The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just put out new physical activity guidelines. I haven't had a chance to look over the actual guidelines, but the biggest area they are stressing is that adults get 2 1/2 hours of moderate activity in a week, or 1 1/4 hour of vigorous activity a week. Do you think Turbulence Training would qualify as vigorous??? They do also recommend some type of strength training 2 times a week.

There's no doubt about it, Turbulence Training gives you the best "bang for your buck" when it comes to getting results from short, vigorous, activities.

These physical activity guidelines offer recommendations on how much activity and what types of activity different groups of people should be getting. The separate it out between children (should get 1 hour of activity in per day), adults (2 1/2 hours per week) and older adults (same 2 1/2 hours as adults).

You can read the press release from HHS here.

I'll be reading over the guidelines this week and will post any thoughts or comments I have later.

During yesterday's strength training session, I tweaked my knee during dumbbell squats. It just felt like a light pinch over my right knee cap, nothing major but I need to watch it and not over train. Since I tweaked my knee I wanted to try and minimize any impact on it for an interval session today. The obvious choice was to hit the pool and do my intervals in the water.

I really enjoy swimming. Growing up in Miami/Ft.Lauderdale, everyone had a pool in their back yard as well as the gorgeous beaches. Living in Cleveland, I'm right off of Lake Erie so I've been in and around water all my life but it had been quite awhile since I'd spent any time in the water.

It's a humbling experience when you first get back in a pool and try to do laps. When I was younger, I could literally swim all day long but time and inactivity caught up to me. Training for the SEAL Challenge helped me find my swimming grove again and by the time I took the SEAL Challenge, I was back into good swimming condition though I still hadn't reached my ultimate goal of swimming a mile.

Well, it seems swimming is no different from running or weight lifting, if you don't do it for a while you lose that conditioning (was this really unexpected? no, not really) and have to start over.

Even though the swim was harder than I had hoped, I still did decent intervals. I warmed up by swimming freestyle for 3 minutes. That was an achievement itself. I was questioning my ability to do sprints after that light warm up.

After warming up I swam 25M (one length) as fast as I could freestyle and then I'd slowly breast stroke back and rest for a minute or two. I did 6 sets of this routine and WOW was my heart pumping after each sprint.

I may switch to swimming for all my intervals, not only do I feel like I got a great cardio workout, my entire body feels like it got a great, low-impact workout too.

Who knows, by next summer maybe I'll be sporting a Michael Phelps like body from swimming so much!