Building a Fitness Routine
Fitness is so important to your health, energy, happiness, and longevity. Exercise helps keep your body, mind, and spirit in great shape, letting you live life with vitality, enthusiasm, and comfort. But, while any exercise is always better than none, the real benefits come from building a routine to getting regular physical activity.
Benefits of Consistent Exercise
Getting physical activity on a regular basis provides so many amazing benefits. To name just a few, regular exercise:
• Reduces the risk of developing many health problems and diseases, including hypertension, high cholesterol, heart disease, stroke, numerous cancers, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, cognitive decline, and others
• Helps with weight control
• Extends life expectancy
• Increases energy levels, strength, stamina, flexibility, and range of motion
• Boosts circulation (and with it, oxygenation and nutrient delivery)
• Promotes better sleep
• Improves mood
• Builds self-confidence
• Enhances memory and ability to concentrate
• Combats stress, anxiety, and related physical, mental, and emotional symptoms
• Increases productivity and stimulates creativity
• Makes life happier and more fun!
Why Consistency Matters
Exercise provides a lot of short-term benefits that can quickly diminish if you don’t keep it up. If you revert to inactivity, the gains you’ve made won’t last long. Your blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides can start to become elevated again; your stamina and energy begin dropping off; muscles atrophy; and all those other benefits mentioned above will come undone.
Also, consistency is essential to disease-prevention benefits. It’s only by being physically active on a regular, ongoing, long-term basis that you meaningfully reduce your risk of developing so many chronic and degenerative conditions.
It’s much the same as learning to make smart dietary choices rather than going on a diet. When you diet, you temporarily reduce calories. Then, when you stop dieting and go back to eating the way you were, you gain back any lost weight. But if, instead of dieting, you adopt permanent, sensible changes to the way you eat every day, you don’t have to diet and experience the weight loss roller coaster.
Making It a Routine!
The only way to keep up with your exercise on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis for the long run is to incorporate it into your lifestyle as a routine. On a fundamental level, we’re all creatures of habit, even the most spontaneous people. If you think about it, even being spontaneous is a habit. The key steps to setting up a routine include:
1. Goal setting – short and long term goals, you need to define what it is that you are wanting to achieve. This creates your X-Factor to make all those moments you want to quit as hard as possible.
2. Planning the details of your fitness routine holds such weight to your success. Do this with your doctor or a trainer who can assist you in mapping out a comprehensive, effective, safe routine to go through over the week. Planning a routine ensures you set yourself clear expectations before starting each workout and that you don’t sell yourself short to finish before you planned.
3. Scheduling your workouts as a non-negotiable. If you don’t schedule it in, you’ll probably fall into the trap that so many people fall into. “I’ll do it tomorrow”. You’ll never be able to find the time. Actually putting something on your schedule has enormous power to make it happen.
4. Finally, a planned routine lets you appreciate your progress as the final step. By regularly following a detailed plan, it’s easy to notice yourself hitting the next level, not to mention assessing and testing yourself to ensure you are improving. Regardless of improvements or maintained results it allows you to go back to the start again and reset with new goals and new plans to keep moving forward.
Look forward to having you all back in clubs soon! Before you begin an exercise program, please consult your doctor. This is particularly important if you’ve been pretty idle for a while, are overweight, have any health conditions, or are in your senior years.
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