Make Health A Lifestyle Change
When you make health a lifestyle change, you’re doing more than just exercising and eating healthier. You’re focusing on all the things that help keep you healthy and fit. Whether you want to lose weight, build your strength and endurance or just tone your body, exercise is just the beginning on your road to fitness. Eating healthier is also mandatory, just as getting adequate sleep and learning to calm your mind. Don’t forget to increase your daily intake of water. That’s often a neglected area when people talk about good health.
You may need help knowing where to start.
Before you start any fitness program you need to check with your health care professional to insure you don’t have any condition that could be exacerbated with too much exercise. That will allow you to comfortably take on any stress from exercise without worrying it’s too much. If you need the help of an expert, our personal trainers will identify your level of fitness and create a program designed especially for it. If you have any physical problems or special needs, they’ll make adjustments to the form to accommodate them.
Losing weight may be as simple as learning to eat healthier.
Eating healthier doesn’t mean dieting. Diets always end and then you go back to old eating habits that made you gain weight in the first place. Diets are also restrictive and difficult to live with on a daily basis. Eating healthier simply means making wiser choices when it comes to food. It might mean learning to cook food differently or eliminating most processed foods and replacing it with whole foods. Some small changes, such as swapping out some of the avocado in guacamole for cooked zucchini may seem small but they save calories. Avocado is a healthy food, but it’s high in calories. You’ll get the benefit of the avocado, but have a lower calorie count with this swap.
Learn how to do each exercise correctly.
If you start your new year determined to lose weight and begin a routine of exercises that minute, you need to make sure you know how to do each exercise correctly or face the potential of injury. Sometimes inhaling when you should be exhaling or turning your wrist wrong can cause an injury that sets you back for months. Sometimes it just minimizes the benefits of exercising. Get help from a personal trainer to learn how to do each exercise correctly for a healthy start for your workout program.
Get plenty of sleep. Exercise will help you sleep sounder, but you need to make sure you’ve carved the time out for it. Somewhere along the line, getting fewer hours of sleep has become a badge of courage, when in reality it’s a health risk.
Make sure drinking extra water every day is on your list of musts for a healthy life. If you’re exercising more, you’ll need to replace the water lost in sweat. Water helps flush your system, keeping you healthier and making your skin look fabulous.
Take care of stress. The hormones created by stress can kill you unless you burn them off with exercise. However, learning to cope with stress helps. Learn to meditate or get a massage to help you eliminate the stresses of the day.
Make whole foods a primary way of eating. Whole foods are the least processed foods and contain the most nutrients. Eating an apple is far better than eating a dish of applesauce.
What Is Your Resolution
Everyone starts the new year with a resolution. It may be to save more money, but in many cases, resolutions have to do with fitness. What is your resolution? Do you want to be thinner, fitter or just feel better? Resolutions are nothing more than wishes unless you change them into goals. That means you need to first identify whether they’re achievable, provide a time frame and create steps to reach the goal. For instance, saying I want to be a millionaire by the end of the year may be a resolution and it has a time frame, but how are you going to do it? It’s also so big, it’s not really believable by your mind, so you need to break it down to smaller achievable goals and identify how you’ll achieve those.
Fitness can be a resolution, but you need to make it a goal to achieve it.
If you want to lose weight, you first have to know how much you weigh or have some other benchmark, such as skinny pants that fit way too tight, to get a starting point. If you use a scale, you can watch the weight drop and the skinny pants fit loser the closer you come to your goal. You also need to make the goal specific and provide a time frame for it. Breaking a huge goal down to smaller ones that are more easily achieved will keep you on track and give you a sense of accomplishment along the way.
Don’t feel bad about asking for help.
Sometimes achieving a goal requires the help of others. Some of the greatest and most successful men in history reached their goals with the help of experts in their field of endeavor. Finding and expert for a fitness goal can be as easy as securing the aid of a personal trainer. In fact, a trainer can help you set goals and show you the steps to achieve them. I love helping people do this and watching how excited they are when they reach their first mini-goal and move on to the next one.
Raise the bar each time.
One of the problems of getting fitter is that most people forget to raise the bar as they achieve each step and find themselves stuck at a certain level. That’s another reason to get help from a trainer. I love watching people achieve goals but also know that they have to take on the next challenge to improve their fitness and health even more.
Get an overall goal and break it down to smaller achievable goals. Then set steps you’ll take to achieve those goals.
Find a way to celebrate your success. You might want to treat yourself to a new outfit or a night on the town when you achieve it.
Make sure you check with your health care professional before you start any fitness program.
Learn to do each exercise correctly to avoid injury and maximize the benefits. Injury can set you back and prevent you from working out for months.