Staying in shape is no easy feat in the era of office jobs and Grubhub. While fitness is important for a long and healthy life, modern life seems to demand that you eschew your fitness in order to save precious seconds to be used elsewhere. However, this isn’t exactly true in order to become a healthier you!
The road to a healthier you starts with these 3 steps
Here’s what you need to know in order to stay fit at your busiest.
Invest In a Home Gym
Making time to get to the gym for an hour a day 3 to 5 hours a week can seem like an impossibility, but that isn’t your only option. While a gym membership has many advantages, you can often have better results when left to your own devices. For example, a home gym can save you a lot of travel time and, more importantly, can give you an advantage by taking away any excuses you may have not to put in the work.
By making some space within your home and purchasing some high end fitness gear such as folding exercise bikes, you can simulate the gym membership fitness routine in the comfort of your own home. However, even those on a budget can benefit from this line of thinking. While fancy equipment can provide the best version of a given exercise, you can make the most of simpler, more cost effective options. For example, weight training can be done with simple dumbbells for a fraction of the cost of its more advanced counterpart. While the results aren’t as good, it’s more than worth the reduction in cost for many.
Start Slow
If pursuing a more active lifestyle fills you with dread, you’re not alone. Being out of shape can make even casual activities more difficult, and dedicated exercise can seem daunting. However, it’s important to remember that the name of the game is improvement, not excellence. If you find yourself struggling with the basics, then the system is working. Once you start to struggle, you also start to improve.
Instead of getting discouraged, you need to take things a step at a time, and you’ll find that each session allows you to get farther and do more than you could before. It’s also important to note that pushing yourself too hard can result in injuries, so pursuing excellence can be a recipe for disaster. Living a more fit and active lifestyle is, above all, about dedication and patience, because Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Plan For Your Goals
The details of your workout are essentially your own. While there are certainly universal rules that apply across the board, your workout will depend on your goal, and so will your diet. For example, a basic workout will entail a series of exercises that encompasses all of your muscle groups in relatively equal measure, while a bodybuilding exercise regimen is more intensive on one group of muscles per day as part of a larger rotation schedule. This is because bodybuilders achieve excessive muscle mass by deliberately and carefully damaging their muscles to encourage hypertrophy. Part and parcel with planning your workout is planning your diet around it.
Your diet is meant to provide your body with the components it needs in order to operate and maintain itself, and that means your diet needs to scale to match your level of activity. For instance, carbohydrates are fuel, and that means that you need to carbs before a workout. Likewise, your body needs additional protein to repair muscles in the wake of your workout. This means that a bodybuilder needs much, much more of both carbs and protein in order to get through and recover from their workouts than the average person.
Fitness may seem complicated, but it becomes simple once you have a few key pieces of information. These tips can give you the keys to the kingdom, but there are always new ways to improve your lifestyle to achieve a higher level of fitness.
About the Writer: Paisley Hansen is a freelance writer and expert in health and fitness. She also developed a passion for traveling during her college years. Today she spends most of her time writing about the things she loves.
