Do you want to look good in your bathing suit? Faster and stronger for a sport? Keep your body from getting sick? You can accomplish all these goals, or at least get a great start by following these 25 fitness tips everyone should know. Living healthy and being fit is easier than you think. Use these tips to turn working out and healthy decisions into a daily habit. You only get one body so take care of it, and it will take care of you!
Motivate Yourself
In order to get started and keep up with a fit lifestyle you have to find a personal motivator. That might be looking good in a bathing suit, lowering your cholesterol, or improving your ability to play a sport. Whatever your motivation is, set goals for yourself and a time period to reach them. You can even record your results. This makes it easier to see the progress which will get you more excited about being healthy.
Be Relentless
Getting fit involves sweating, being tired, sore, and not always eating what your body craves. It takes some will power and discipline. To see the results that you want, make an agreement with yourself that you will workout and eat healthy even when you don’t feel like it. Be willing to fight for your body and stick with it for the long haul. When results are not coming as quickly as you would like, don’t panic and quit. Do a self check and be completely honest. Make some changes and keep chugging.
Get Educated
In the health industry there are many quacks, fakers, and people just trying to sell you a quick fix. Don’t rely on just one source to tell you exactly what you should consume or how you should train. Read articles and blogs that are written by people who actually practice what they preach. Do your own research on topics that you are unsure of. Even the people that are giving you the information are constantly educating themselves. No one knows everything there is to know about any topics. This subject is especially important because there is so much garbage to filter out.
Progression
Your workout should start from the basics. Even if you are an athlete familiar with working out and eating relatively well, whenever you start something new always start with square one. The more capable you are the faster you will progress. Elite athletes often go back to the basics just to perfect form on complex exercises. Its nothing to be ashamed about. It is a way to be realistic with yourself and prevent frustration and injury.
Use Total Body Exercises
Fat loss or calorie expenditure is somewhere on the list of many of our goals. Doing total body exercises is a great way to burn a lot of calories. Examples of this are many olympic lifts like the clean and jerk or multi jointed movements like a front squat and press. Doing total body movements forces big muscle groups to get involved, which brings us to the next point.
Work Big Muscle Groups
Your legs and back are two of the largest muscle groups in the body. They require more calories to function at high intensities than, lets say, a bicep. If you want to get ripped and strong, don’t expect to get those results by going to the gym Jersey Shore style and doing 1000 bicep curls. Use your large muscles for the bulk of your workouts and it will be much more effective.
Get Friends Involved
This is pretty self explanatory. Who doesn’t want friends around? They make everything better: Workouts won’t suck as bad; you will get to spend some quality time; and if they are a real keeper they will keep you accountable when you don’t feel like working out.
Cross Train
Make sure you don’t read this wrong. Cross training is not the same as the recently popular Crossfit. Cross training consists of varying your workouts by playing different sports or doing other things that your body is not used to. If you are a body builder, for example, and running is consistently your cardio routine, then you can switch it up and try kickboxing. You will still get the cardio aspect of your workout accomplished. Two major benefits of this are decreasing strength plateau (the point where you start seeing less strength gains from your workout) and correcting muscle imbalances.
Take A Multi-vitamin
These days it is very hard to get all the essential vitamins and minerals that we need out of our foods. With the hustle and bustle of everyday life it is very hard to eat extremely healthy and wholesome for every meal of the day. Even if you are a super hero and can manage to do that, the quality of foods that are produced these days do not have all of the nutrients that they used to. To fill the gap in your diet it is important to find a good multivitamin. They are cheap, so fitting them into your budget should be pretty easy. The hardest part is getting into the routine of taking one everyday.
Set Up A Home Gym
If you have never made a trip to the gym and found it to be closed, then you are obviously not working out often enough! JUST A JOKE. You are probably just more responsible than me. I’m pretty sure everyone has had a time that they couldn’t make it to the gym because something else just popped up. Having a home gym makes that excuse less viable. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and get a bunch of expensive equipment, or build an extension onto your house. Just some cheap stuff like stability balls and bands can be used to make a killer workout. If it is a bigger priority, then getting a barbell and some rubber plates is not a bad idea either.
Invest In A Fitness Wardrobe
Have you ever heard the saying, “if you look good you feel good, and if you feel good you perform good”? Well that may very well apply to this topic. Going out and getting a nice comfy pair of training shoes and shorts may just give you a reason to get excited and go use them. Who doesn’t want to sweat in style?
Cook At Home
Cooking at home lets you know what is really going into your food. If you don’t know much about eating healthy it can be a fun way to learn about it. Use the other tips that I am recommending. Get some friends involved and do some research on some tasty healthy meals. It can be a fun cooking project. Not to mention buying your food in the grocery store can be a lot cheaper.
Eat Lots Of Vegetables
The daily recommended intake of vegetables is between 2 ½ to 3 cups per day depending on your age. If you are younger you may need more. Vegetables are a great low fat cheap snack with lots of vitamins and less sugar than fruits. I would recommend that you think of vegetables as an unlimited source of food throughout the day. Even if you happen go over the daily recommended intake, in most cases it won’t hurt. There will be an article in the near future that goes into more detail about fruits and vegetables.
Eat Lean Meats
If you are a vegetarian then this doesn’t apply to you, and that’s not a bad thing. But definitely check out the supplement if you need to tip. For all the meat eaters out there, always think about where your food is coming from. You want the animals that you are eating to be properly fed and mobile creatures. Stay away from the animals that are fed garbage just to fatten them up. It can be hard to find out that information, but there are labels on many meat packages that will tell you if it was free roaming and grass fed. If that isn’t available you can just tell by looking at most meats if it is lean or not (A lot of white is bad). The only problem with eyeing the meat is that you don’t know if they were fed growth hormones or other chemicals, but that is a whole different topic.
Exercise 6 Days A Week
I would recommend doing something for 6 days a week, especially if you are just starting. That doesn’t mean you crush your body every single day. Even if you do nothing but stretch for 30 minutes one day, that still means you are improving yourself somehow. When you keep yourself going for 6 days a week it keeps your mind on your body and how you are going to improve it everyday. It also keeps you in a routine that builds a habit. Then you will have less chances to take days off just because you don’t feel like it.
Stretch
In order to move properly and decrease injury, your limbs must be able to have a good range of motion. Tight muscles are the primary reason for a low range of motion. Stretching regularly will help to elongate your muscles and allow your limbs to move more freely.
Circuit Train
This style of training is basically jumping from one exercise to another with little to no breaks in between. It is very versatile because you can pick a limitless amount of different exercises and put them into a circuit. When you are done with the circuit of exercises, just go through it again. If you train this way you might find that your workouts get done quicker and are at a higher intensity.
Stay Hydrated
Our bodies are 50-75% water depending on our age, gender, and some other factors. Just this fact should tell you how important it is. Water keeps our bodies cool, and it is necessary for metabolic functions. If you are not hydrated then your body won’t be happy when you try to physically exert yourself. It’s also necessary to carry nutrients throughout your body, and take out the substances that your body doesn’t want anymore. Besides air, water is probably the most important thing to your body.
Vary The Workout Location
All of us get sick of the same things day in and day out. Every once in a while go visit a different gym. Try a workout class that you like. The cheapest way to get a change of scenery is to go outside. Take all the items from your new home gym, and set up an outdoors workout. There are public parks everywhere. I’m sure most of you are model tax-paying citizens, so you might as well go and enjoy the parks that you paid for. This is a good way to keep your workouts from getting redundant.
Get Sleep
Our bodies recover and grow in our sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep you may be sore for a longer period of time, or not get results as quickly as you would like. Even though sleep is good, too much can be bad. There have been studies that show too much sleep is not great for the heart. Not to mention, if you sleep all day that’s less time you could be working out or planning a healthy meal!!!
Eat According To Your Goal
If you are trying to bulk up, then you need more calories and protein. If you are trying to lean down, then decrease the calories in your diet. Get your carbs from vegetables and some fruit. Your protein should be lean.
Get A Gym Membership
There are a whole range of different gyms out there that fit literally everyone’s different personalities. Find one that you like and get a membership. If you belong somewhere it is easier to make working out a daily routine. Even if you work long hours, find one that is on the way to your job. If you pass by the sign everyday it will remind you. That will also make it easier to stop by for a quick sweat and get right back on your merry way.
Supplement If You Need To
Take this advice with caution. The supplement industry is a billion dollar business with a lot of bark and more often then not, just a little bite. By that I mean that most supplements will promise you the world, but barely anything that’s on the nutrition label is really in the package. The FDA regulates this industry very loosely, so you have to be on the lookout for yourself. With that being said supplements can be very useful if you get the right stuff. One of the best cases where they can really help is with vegetarians. If you are a vegetarian it will be hard to get a lot of the good protein and creatine in your diet that you find in meats. Finding a good supplement would probably not be a bad idea, especially if you’re looking to build muscle. One last precaution…….It’s called a supplement for a reason. It’s supposed to supplement your diet. Even though in many cases supplementing can help greatly, don’t let it replace real food.
Train Like An Athlete
The fittest people in the world are athletes. If it works for them then it should work for you too right? A big benefit that athletes have is a solid motivator. They are all trying to get better at their sport. Even if you’re not an athlete you can have that same mentality. Go find a sport that you can play with a group of people. Find a recreational league or pickup a sport as a hobby. It would probably be a lot of fun and it could be a way to cross train, too. If none of that appeals to you then just train for life in general with an athletes mentality.
Have Fun!
Find the fun in everything that you do. If you aren’t having fun, then the results will suffer. Even if you didn’t like the last 24 tips, or perhaps disagree with them, remember this one! If you are having fun creating your own fit lifestyle, then you will surely find a way that gets you the results that you want.
Hopefully you learned something from these 25 fitness tips everyone should know. If you think of any other tips then leave them in the comments below and drop us a line on facebook or twitter.
About Adam Pegg
