If you would like to improve or maintain your health then eating a better diet and getting regular exercise is vital. There are many health benefits to leading a healthier lifestyle including helping to reduce the risk of serious physical health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke in addition to improving brain functions and mental health.
Staying active doesn’t have to mean spending hours running at the gym every day which can soon become tedious. The best way to stay active and live a healthy lifestyle, is doing exercise that you enjoy, whether that is cycling, playing sports, swimming, or taking a walk around your neighbourhood.
When making a plan to get healthier and exercise more, you should tailor it to your preferred workout styles and mix it up every so often if it’s getting repetitive.
Even though it’s best to create a plan that suits you, there are of course some recommended pieces of advice and steps anyone should take when starting a new exercise regimen which you can read about in the guide below.
Change Your Diet
One of the most effective ways to become healthier is eating a balanced diet that is full of fruit and vegetables. Even though it can be expensive to stock your fridge every week with healthy foods, you can easily get coupons and promo codes at www.swagbucks.com/shop/kohls-coupons which can be used at most big stores in the US. When planning to change your diet you should do some research on what is involved and then make a wish list according to your budget.
Typically, a healthy diet should include the following:
- Fruit and vegetables to ensure you are getting plenty of antioxidants, fiber, minerals, and vitamins
- Whole-grain foods such as barley, brown rice, and oatmeal that contain B vitamins, fiber, and protein
- Protein-rich foods; eggs, cheese, fish, lean red meats, legumes, low-fat milk, nuts, and tofu
As well as ensuring your diet includes lots of healthy food it is also essential to avoid certain foods especially processed food that contains lots of fat, salt, and sugar. Foods to remove from your diet are chips, cookies, deli meats, hamburgers, pizza, white bread, and white rice.
Set Goals
Before you start your journey to achieve better health and fitness, you should decide on a list of goals you would like to reach. Generally, when setting goals people use the SMART formula to create goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. For example, your goals for being healthier and more active may be:
- Specific: Exercise for at least 30 minutes per day
- Measurable: Tracking how far you ran or walked, or setting a target for repetitions of certain exercises
- Attainable: make sure your targets or goals are achievable, start with lower aims and work your way up
- Realistic: don’t set goals that you can’t achieve, start slow and build-up
- Time-bound: set yourself a time limit within which to achieve goals such as aiming for 30 minutes running per day after 3-4 weeks
Get At Least 30 Minutes of Exercise Per Day
According to many people in the fitness and health sectors, people should be getting approximately 30 minutes of physical activity per day, however breaking it up into three sessions of 10 minutes each works just as well.
Even though going to the gym or running are probably the quickest and most common ways of getting fit, there are also several other less intensive daily workouts you can do which may better suit your interests and energy levels, these include:
- Badminton
- Briskly walking around your neighborhood or local park
- Gardening
- Cycling
- Playing tennis
- Swimming
- Water aerobics
Stretch First
Stretching before and after exercise is an important part of maintaining muscles that are flexible, healthy, and strong. Without adequate stretching muscles can shorten and become tight leading to aches and decreased movement. Although, stretching won’t make your muscles fully flexible and supple straight away, a noticeable difference is usually felt after a few months. Regularly stretching both before and after any exercise will gradually make working out easier and reduce the risk of injury.
Set a Budget
The financial cost of getting into shape can start to add up especially if you decide to join a gym or choose to get dietary supplements. Despite this, eating healthily and working out every day can cost almost nothing as there are plenty of workouts you can do at home or outside without much equipment required. Some of the most popular and easy to get into exercises include dancing, jogging, doing jumping jacks, jumping rope, running, pushups, squats, and weight training.
If you are looking to improve your fitness and well-being, it is a good idea to check your goals and list the food and exercise equipment you need to ensure you don’t go over budget which can lead to extra stress and possibly missing your fitness targets.
Give Your Muscles a Good Workout
Maybe growing and toning your muscles is your focus when working out, if so you will need to decide which muscles you would like to focus on and then make a suitable workout plan. The main muscle groups people tend to work on are in the abdomen, arms, back, chest, legs and shoulders. At first, it is recommended to avoid working on all the muscle groups every day as it may lead to muscle strains and injuries, although most people do build up to it by rotating which muscle groups they focus on and increasing repetitions.
Vary Your Exercise
Doing the same exercise and physical activities every day may soon get boring and lead to some people losing interest, therefore it is a smart move to occasionally mix up your routine. For people who are signed up at a gym, it should be easy to take advantage of their range of classes and equipment to maintain a routine that is varied whilst outside of the gym it is possible to keep it fresh by working out in different locations and doing different activities each day.
Switching over to a healthier and more active lifestyle involves a lot of hard work, patience, and time, however, it can be a faster and smoother process if you take note of some useful advice and guidance.
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