Eight Exercise Tips

Exercise Tip 1: Get a Partner

Ask a reliable friend to be your workout partner. Just the knowledge that the person is depending on you to work out increases your odds of staying on track with your exercise. As an added incentive, pay for missed workouts. Every time you skip a workout with your workout partner, pay her $10. Of course, it goes both ways.

Exercise Tip 2: Use Short Workouts

You don’t need to exercise for thirty minutes or more to achieve the maximum results. Recent studies have shown that short increments of exercise throughout the day produce the same effect as one longer workout. Plan your day to accommodate several ten-minute exercise routines. Fit in three of those workouts and you have a total of thirty minutes for the day.

Exercise Tip 3: Add Variety

The fastest way to see changes in your body is to keep surprising it. Changing your exercise routine every few days (or weeks) prevents your body from becoming conditioned to the same exercise day after day. Different activities require different muscles, which means you work more muscles, so you see the effects on your body in less time.

Exercise Tip 4: Equip Yourself

When you have exercise equipment at the office (or home) and ready to use, you are much more likely to take a few minutes to work out. If something such as a treadmill is not practical in your office, plenty of smaller workout tools can challenge and strengthen your muscles.

Resistance bands come in a variety of tensions so you can choose the best level of resistance for your needs. These bands are practically weightless, take up almost no room, and can be used for upper body exercise, stretching, leg training, and more.

Also consider a small, inexpensive set of dumbbells, ranging in weight from three to ten pounds. Most come with a small storage rack to keep the weights safely out of the way. Dumbbells are used primarily for upper body workouts, but many exercises that use dumbbells call on the lower body muscles at the same time.

You may also want to consider buying a yoga mat, which can do triple duty for yoga, stretching routines, and Pilates exercises.

Exercise Tip 5: Know Your Excuses and Head Them Off

Write down all the excuses you use to avoid exercising. Then, go back and counter all of your excuses. If you wrote down lack of time as an excuse, oppose it with suggestions for short, frequent workouts rather than one long session. If you can anticipate your own excuses and know how to respond to them, you are less likely to get sidetracked.

Exercise Tip 6: Make It Fun!

If you become bored with your chosen workout, break out of the boredom by choosing activities that appeal to you. Instead of spending thirty minutes inside on the treadmill, go for a hike on a local nature path. Rather than doing your aerobics video for the 100th time, go outside with your kids and jump on the trampoline. The goal is to choose an activity that you enjoy and that requires physical activity: tennis, bicycling, dancing, walking the dog, etc.

Exercise Tip 7: Schedule and Commit

Apply a sense of obligation to your personal exercise program and you’ll increase your chances of having a consistent workout plan. Schedule exercise time into your planner and treat it like an important business meeting or client appointment.

Exercise Tip 8: Reward Yourself

Set checkpoints throughout your exercise program to assess your progress. Whether your goal is to lose weight, build muscle, or simply improve your health, take the time to check up on your improvement and then reward yourself for all the hard work!

Make Your Health a Priority

Although juggling a career, family, and more is highly demanding and doesn’t often leave much time for self care, in the long run neglecting exercise damages both your physical and emotional health (and by extension the lives of people close to you). By neglecting your needs, you send your body and psyche the message that you are not as important as other things. Ignore your body too long and you may find yourself with serious health issues that could have been avoided simply with some preventative self care.

Six Health Tips

Here are some simple health tips that can make a big difference. These basic changes won’t cost you a lot of time, effort, or money, but they will give you results in just a few weeks.

Health Tip 1: Stop drinking soda.

Cutting out soda can make a difference in your waistline in just a week! Sodas are full of nutritionally worthless sugar and calories. Drinking more than one a day adds some serious calories to your daily intake and pounds on your body. Cutting out your daily soda saves you more than 87,000 calories over a year’s time - that’s equal to over twenty-five pounds!

And don’t replace the sugar-filled sodas with sugar-free ones—artificial sweeteners not only may contribute to numerous health problems, but research has also shown that people who use artificial sweeteners are often heavier than those who use sugar (possibly because the artificial sweetener increases your appetite).

Health Tip 2: Add more fiber to your diet.

Fiber isn’t just about keeping you regular. Fiber in your diet fills you up faster and helps keep your appetite under control. Fiber is found in a variety of vegetables and grains, so you have many options.

Health Tip 3: Make sure you get enough sleep.

Lack of sleep doesn’t just make you drowsy during the day, it can also make you prone to cravings, irritability, and even weight gain. Studies have shown that not getting adequate sleep suppresses the production of leptin, a peptide that tells the body to burn calories. (Read a research paper.)

Health Tip 4: Drink your water.

When you are dehydrated, your body sends signals to the brain that are misinterpreted as hunger pangs. Drinking enough water throughout the day keeps you satisfied and can prevent decreased energy, constipation, and slowed mental reactions. A general guideline is to drink eight 8-oz. glasses of water throughout the day, but pay attention to your body’s needs. Drink more water if you feel your body needs it.

Health Tip 5: Eat your calories.

Soda, beer, and wine add up the empty calories fast and are full of sugars that make you crave more. Satisfy your hunger and the emotional need to eat by choosing nutrient-rich food with a minimum of preservatives.

Health Tip 6: Take 10,000 steps every day.

Recent studies show that while most people believe they take ten thousands steps a day or more, in reality that number is closer to 3,000 to 4,000. Challenge yourself by buying a pedometer and wearing it during an average day. Check the total number of steps at the end of the day. Anything less than 5,000 needs improvement! Ten thousand steps are about equal to five miles of walking. Make it your goal to take ten thousand steps every day.

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