How to exercise like a pro [Full guide].

Staying fit helps you to maintain your weight and overall health. Though many find it hard to make the time for, it’s essential for a healthy lifestyle!

Overall fitness ensures that your body can cope with stress, on a cellular level. It ensures your body is running as efficiently and effectively as possible. It improves blood flow, ensures healthy weight management, positive mood, energy, well-being and even mental health illnesses.

Below are some simple tips that will help you optimise your fitness.

1. Choosing a health focused protocol.

As we mentioned in the previous health guide, ‘diets’ are not the right approach to take, rather it’s better to focus on a general protocol that is tailored to your goals. Well you guessed it, the same applies to exercising!

Focus less on the latest two week celebrity fat burning programs touted by the media, and rather focus your energy on building a routine with exercises that specifically help you achieve your fitness goals.

Defining fitness goals is important too. Many people might view looking fit, skinny or muscular as being healthy, when many of times looks can be deceiving. Our recommendations focus on exercises that help you improve your overall health, rather than aesthetics.

Tips:

1. Focus on whole-body activities and movement based exercises as opposed to aesthetics. Training for health refers to exercise that primarily targets health outcomes, such as improving mental capacity, attitude, stress reduction/control, energy gains, reducing inflammation and eliminating plaque buildup in the arteries. Though using machines at the gym are important for training certain muscle groups, they don’t necessarily focus on what is important for health, which is improving cardiovascular performance, overall mobility and strength. As humans we’re meant to move, and focusing entirely on the surface level of looking good can actually do a lot of damage to our bodies, as in some cases you’re adding extra weight to a body not conditioned to support it. A great place to learn more about movement based routines is with Ido Portal’s Movement practices.
2. Walking and running are two activities that you should be doing for at least 20 minutes 3–4 times a week (ideally every day), as they help keep your cardiovascular system healthy by preventing heart disease and stroke, according to the heart foundation. Cardio has also been shown to improve cognitive performance by influencing and activating certain neurotransmitters and hormones in your brain — such as endorphins — which are associated with feeling happier and more relaxed, leading to improved wellbeing.
3. Though exercise will definitely help you maintain your weight and tighten up those loose ends so to speak, you should not focus on exercising to lose weight. It may seem counterintuitive, but being overweight is not due to a lack of exercise for the most part, it’s due to poor dietary habits. More specifically it’s due to consistently consuming more calories than you burn, which is then stored as fat. So if you’re trying to lose weight the best practice is to solve the underlying issue of your diet first, and use exercise to speed up the process by burning more calories. If you don’t sort out your diet first, you will find yourself unable to make any significant changes when it comes to weight.

2. Building habits that stick.

What’s the point of exercise if you can’t make it a habit, right? Exercise is definitely about consistency, as is improving all the other areas of your health. Thankfully there’s a few ways to form habits more easily!

There’s quite a consensus on the habit-forming process, which is shown in the diagram above. You first start with a routine (aka an action) which you get rewarded for.

A simple example of this is brushing your teeth after each meal, with the reward being the prevention of tooth-decay and brighter looking teeth. This reward is also neurological, as dopamine is released which expresses a pleasurable sensation, thereby giving the action a positive association.

This positive association helps create cues which will intuitively remind you to do it again, as your body knows it will get a reward for doing so. That’s essentially how habits work!

Here’s a few tips for working out those habits!

Tips:

1. A really straightforward way to form habits is to set reminders. You can set reminders based on time or location so that you don’t forget. Eventually the goal is to remember the habit off by heart, but until that point simple cues are really helpful! Using the reminders app on your smartphone, or setting up events in your calendar will do the trick.
2. Another important part of habits is tracking your progress. Without a clear idea of how you’re doing, it’s hard to stay motivated and keep on going. A great tool for this is using the built in Apple Health or Google Fit apps on your mobile device, to track several activities. If you want to take it a step further, getting a fitness tracking device like a FitBit and FitBit Scalescan help automate the tracking of many physical activities for you. Once you have the data you will be able to adjust your habits by incorporating new practices.
3. Workout with friends! Being social makes it more enjoyable and interactive. You can encourage one another and even compete with one another, which will help you both reach your goals.
4. Lastly, if you’re serious about getting fit and forming a habit you can use Beeminder, a neat service that makes you put money on the line. Beeminder asks you to select a dollar figure (say $1,000 dollars) and nominate a friend to confirm if you completed the goal or not. As an example, you could set a goal of losing 5kg in 6 months. If you fail to achieve that goal $1,000 of your hard earned cash will be deposited from your account and donated to charity. This is a great way to really motivate yourself to get the job done, especially when you set a high figure that would really set you back.

3. Office best practices.

With more and more people working at desks nowadays there’s a massive shift in how our bodies are utilised, namely there’s a significant reduction in movement which has many nasty side effects.

Historically humans were very physically active, needing to hunt and gather food, explore new lands and generally enjoy the beauty that is nature.

Ever since the industrial revolution this has changed, as many new forms of jobs have been created, which don’t involved a whole lot of movement.

Not only is a lack of movement unhealthy for the body, but other things such as poor posture can lead to a lot of pain. Second to that, the lack of regular movement creates resistance to go and exercise, which makes it even harder for people to form a consistent routine.

Below are a few ways to upgrade your workplace!

Tips:

1. Get a standing desk! It’s very important that you alternate between sitting and standing throughout the day, to balance out the weight on different parts of your body. An easy way to achieve this is to set a reminder on your iPhone to kick start your habit into rotating between the two. If you find that your feet begin to get sore, bounce on your toes back and forth to increase circulation to this area. The great news is that it’s cost effective and environmentally friendly, at only $29 a piece. So go grab an OriStand, they’re what we use at our office.
2. An important practice is to improve your posture. Set a reminder on your computer or iPhone to correct your posture every couple of hours, so that you get in the habit of sitting up in a healthy form. An easy way to fix your posture is to make sure your head is upright, back straight, shoulders relaxed and abdominal muscles engaged. Your screen should be eye level so that you don’t have to tilt your head down, as that will eventually cause server neck, shoulder and back pain.
3. Another neat trick to improve posture and core is to perform planks on a daily basis. This will fire up your core and ensure it activates and contracts efficiently throughout the day.

If you’re interested in making your brain perform better, learn more about Hapi below.

Be happy and stay healthy peeps 😀

— The Hapi team.