According to the American Heart Association, for an individual to stay fit and healthy, the recommended amount of exercise is five times per week.
Health and wellness are often used interchangeably, but they have slightly different meanings. Health is defined as the state of physical and mental health, which usually denotes lack of disease and abnormality.
On the contrary, wellness is defined as the overall process of maintaining good health. Wellness is this achievable due to the conscious decisions on the part of life taken by the individual.
But many don’t obey and thus, end up with various health problems in the latter part of their lives. The common excuse everyone has is they don’t have time to invest in or blame their busy schedule.
But is that true!?? Let me remind you, every single person has 168 hours in a week, and good health demands two and half hours out of your week, and for what!? To have a better, healthier life or say you live longer.
What are the benefits that come with being fit and exercising regularly?
Fitness is just a lifestyle adaptation that is not going to get incorporated as a quick fix. You have to incorporate it into your daily routine, just like brushing teeth or taking a shower.
So, getting it straight and staying fit by exercise is a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle. The benefits include:
- Reduced Health Problems.
- Boost Brain Functions.
- Improved Mental Health.
- Train Discipline.
- Instill Confidence.
So, exercise is a keystone habit, which is why anyone is looking to develop self-discipline. Thus, staying fit by exercise is described as a miraculous drug and proves to be a highly recommended treatment for depression, insomnia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.
While exercising, certain hormones like serotonin, endorphins, and a protein known Brain-Derived-Neurotrophic-Factor (BDNF) are seen to be secreted, which reduce stress levels, lift someone’s mood, aids in better sleep, and improves learning.
Biological changes occur then physically, and then you are ready for the difference. So, let’s see what some of the modern mantras to stay fit are:
8 Tips to Stay Fit and Healthy in Modern Life
Don’t Skip Warm-Ups.
Before you begin any workout, you should warm-up and stretch your body to avoid any injuries during the training. The warm-up activity can include: back turns, high knee twists, arm circles, knee hugs, ski hops, jumping oblique twists, and side bends.
At the end of this workout, your body will be warmed up and ready for any physical activity. So, do try this warm-up workout, and tell us how you feel after that! Ideally, it’s best if a warm-up session is always done before any exercise you perform, so try to stick to this plan.
One of the best warm-up sessions is running, and for this, you can run outside or use a treadmill. If you are exercising at home only, Homeful has covered the list of best treadmills in India for running at home.
Stay Hydrated
Water, by far, is an essential nutrient to the body and is the primary source of hydration during exercise. The four significant necessities for which we need to hydrate ourselves with water are during sports. It’s one of the crucial reasons for keeping our body relaxed, especially in hot environments.
Global warming is compelling us to keep it as a safety ingredient, or the death due to strokes is no less a menace now as it happened recently on 29th of June, 2021 where many people lost their lives in Canada amid an unpredictable heatwave that has broken all the history of temperature records.
Another aspect is it delays the feeling of early fatigue and maintains mental sharpness. It acts as an excellent fluid to satisfy our thirst and sets in weight loss. It meets the urge to eat something and finally helps one recover quickly from any physically specific activities.
The actual mechanism is as a person exercises; heat is generated by working muscles, which raises the entire body’s temperature. When the temperature rises, it sweats; as the sweat evaporates, the body cools.
If this loss by work is not replaced by drinking sufficient fluids, the body’s water balance will be upset. The body may soon overheat, causing high thirst, chills, muscle pain, throbbing heart, clammy skin, or even heart strokes if too serious.
So, suppose you are careless of this step. In that case, your performance will be affected significantly and keep you on the bed for more than the required period and thus, lead to a significant loss of your progression and performance. So, don’t lose your progress just because you failed to hydrate yourself.
Fit in Cardio
Cardiac or cardiovascular exercise, which is any exercise that raises your heartbeat, can dramatically affect your level of fitness and overall health.
Your respiratory and cardiovascular systems work in combination to deliver oxygen you breathe into parts of your body. Regular cardio exercise sessions strengthen both organ systems and many of the other organs interrelated to these systems.
Regular cardio exercises can help increase the potential lung capacity or the amount of air your lungs can hold on to; your resting heart rate will be lowered, making it much more efficient than average.
Regular cardio, weight lifting, and good nutritional diets can also help prevent fat accumulation. Losing more calories than you take in is key to weight loss. Regular cardio sessions are also a great way to increase the number of calories your body regularly burns.
Your stamina will improve with time, and walking long distances becomes easy for you. Regular activities like going upstairs, doing housework, or taking care of the yard won’t make you feel tired. Regularly doing cardio can also lengthen your lifespan. So, do cardio to get a healthier and longer life.
Prioritization of Protein in Diet
Let’s discuss the amount of protein needed in the right amount for the body. So, according to various scientific studies, if you are losing fat or building muscle or performing resistance training, it’s recommended that one must consume 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per lean body mass, not total body mass. The lean body mass is the whole body weight minus the fat accumulated on the body.
The next idea about post-workout protein intake is not like consuming all the required proteins within 30 minutes. But the reality is, its window period is like 6 hours, but it depends on the training intensity.
But if you’re training right, there is no need to take the protein in a hurry; instead, it’s like the whole day where you can break it into chunks and consume it accordingly. All that matters is having adequate protein at the end.
But as recommended, take protein regularly, be in the form of protein powder or chicken breasts. It all depends on you to stay fit, and the schedule one has.
One can have eggs as they are one the richest sources of proteins available in nature. It’s like a multivitamin, but always maintain a proper ratio and calculate and ingest. Maintain a higher protein to fewer carbohydrates ratio.
Lift Weights
Weight training might not burn as many calories as aerobics or cardio. Still, it does build up and develop muscle mass. Muscle increases your resting metabolism and helps you burn much more calories even when at rest.
Still, it’s more of a long-term investment of sorts by making it easier for your body to burn more calories over time. Weights don’t matter at first, but slowly you must keep increasing it.
But this is only true when going near failure, and one benefit of lifting heavy weights is the better strength gains you see than lightweights. High reps with light weights are the key to successful fitness.
Post-Workout Stretch
Stretching after your workout is essential because you want to lower your body’s temperature and bring your heartbeat rate down slowly after exercising hard. You only need a routine to help your muscles relax and recover. It is also great to avoid your body getting tense and increase flexibility.
Rest As Needed
As you can see, taking rest is a critical component in strength and muscle gain. Suppose we do not give our muscles enough time to recover. In that case, we cannot expect growth, as we will keep breaking our muscles down without proper recovery time.
You must design a workout program to avoid overtraining so that your muscles get enough time to recover. At a minimum, never target the same power twice a week. You should give a rest of at least two days or 48 hours to the muscles for recovery.
Suppose the training is intense where we perform more than three exercises for the same muscle group in a day. In that case, it is better only to target a particular muscle group once a week.
An essential part of exercising is sleep. It is during sleep that our body is most active in strengthening our muscles. We must therefore make sure that we achieve the targeted 8 hours of sleep or ample sleep.
However, everybody is different. You need to evaluate your sleep quality to make sure you’re filled with energy. So, sleep is the key to consistently keep going.
Do One Workout Which You Enjoy
Enjoying the workout or exercise is necessary. So, keep at least one activity you love to do, which shall help you shred your extra calories. Going to the gym or running a treadmill is not only the hard and fast rule that can significantly help you lose weight.
Any physical activity which you love to do and gain the same benefits as exercising it’s ok. If you love jumping rope, you can invest much of your time in it. Similarly, if you love karate or love to dance, you can make it a part of your fitness, which shall help you stay fit by making you happy and energized.
Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress is one of the necessary pieces of information for stay fit motivation. You can track your progress by a fitness tracker, weighing machine or measuring tapes or click your before and after pictures to observe the difference.
The most common places to measure are your calves, waist, thighs, arms, shoulders, and hips. Write and notice each difference that will help you track your changes and progress in a better way. The best three methods are:
1) The scale – You can easily track your fitness progress by using a scale to measure your weight. However, this can be deceiving if you are building muscle and gaining weight. That is why you must also use it.
2) Measuring Tape – Get a small measuring tape so that you can measure your neck, chest, and back, arms, waist, quads, and calves. It may be that you have gained 2lbs this week, but you lost half an inch on your waistline.
3) Pictures and The Mirror – You want to take pictures of yourself from the front, the back, and the side every two weeks. With images of yourself every two weeks, you can quickly point out the noticeable differences in your progress.
