Fitness Routines for Travel
Sticking to a fitness routine can be hard while traveling. Whether for work or vacation, being on the road can disrupt your workout schedule, your access to equipment, your diet, and your motivation. Unfortunately, even a short lapse in your routine can bring your fitness momentum to a halt, making it hard to restart your diet and exercise regimen after returning from a trip. The good news is that staying fit while on the road is possible. Anyone can learn to be a healthy and fit road warrior with these simple but effective tips for maintaining your fitness routine, avoiding weight gain, keeping your energy up, and enjoying your trip without guilt or stress.
Dieting for Fitness Progress
Most of us have tried making healthy eating a habit, but when life gets busy, somehow we slip back into familiar, less healthy eating patterns. Why does a busy lifestyle make sticking to a healthy diet so difficult? This article explores some common barriers to nutrition plan adherence and offers recommendations for making healthy eating a permanent lifestyle change, even for the busiest people.
Body Composition Management
If you’re like most people, you exercise and try to eat a healthy diet because you want to alter or maintain your body composition, namely, the amount of body fat and muscle mass on your frame. How can you be sure that your efforts are paying off? The easiest way to verify this is to regularly check your key body composition metrics: weight, body-fat percentage, and fat-free mass index (FFMI). (If you don’t know how to take these measurements, check out this podcast.)
Long-term success at controlling body-fat percentage and muscle mass doesn’t come from checking body composition occasionally; legitimate control requires a consistent feedback mechanism. This article explains how even the busiest people can easily include a body composition feedback mechanism in their fitness regimen.
The Case for At-Home Workouts
A new year is the ideal time to consider new fitness goals, which may mean starting a new exercise routine or recalibrating an existing one. If you’re like most people, you lead a busy life and struggle to fit exercise into your daily routine. To ensure your exercise routine fits your lifestyle, think seriously about where you’ll be exercising, because your workout location can be crucial to establishing long-term behavior change.
After New Year’s, commercial fitness facilities crank up the advertising and offer special deals to take advantage of people’s desire to lose weight gained during the holidays or achieve a New Year’s resolution. But for most people, professional equipment and expert services aren’t effective in the long run.
Eliminating Dieting Complexity
One of the most difficult parts of creating a healthy nutrition plan is determining which dieting approach to take. The vast array of dieting options can make choosing one a nerve-racking and complex experience. For most busy people, designing and managing a healthy diet plan is a tedious and complicated process.
The Complexity of Diet and Nutrition
Unfortunately, nutrition and complexity tend to go hand in hand. In fact, a 2012 study showed that 50 percent of Americans say that figuring out their income taxes is less complex than creating a healthy meal plan.
Do You Need Isolation Exercises?
You may not be familiar with the term isolation exercise, but it refers to a very common type of exercise that’s typically included in traditional strength-training programs. If you’re a busy person looking to make the most of your workout time, it’s important to know what isolation exercises are and when they are appropriate to use.
What Are Isolation Exercises?
Isolation exercises are strength-training movements that require the use of only a single joint to perform; some common examples are biceps curls, leg extensions, and triceps pulldowns. In most commercial gyms, a large percentage of the machines on the floor are for some type of isolation exercise.
Sustaining Fitness Motivation
The biggest challenge most people face when trying to improve their physical fitness is a lack of motivation. They might get excited about some new diet or workout program, but after a short time, their motivation fades.
One of the main reasons people can’t stay motivated is that they’re not totally clear on what they’re trying to achieve. They’ll make statements such as “I want to get healthier,” “I want to have more energy,” or “I want to lose weight.” These goals are great starting points, but they’re not focused enough. To stay motivated long term, you need to ask yourself why. Why do you want to get healthier? Why do you want more energy? Why do you want to lose weight?
What Is Friction?
More than 75 percent of Americans want to get more physically fit, but only 3 percent of them succeed at maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Why is the success rate so low? The most common reasons people give for not exercising or skipping planned workouts are a lack of time and a lack of energy. And the perceived complexity of following a healthy diet is a common reason for not eating right. What conclusion can we draw? Most people fail to maintain a healthy lifestyle because they don’t have the time or energy to fit diet and exercise into their lives consistently.
When trying to improve their health, most people try to force new behaviors into their already busy routines without considering the potential negative impacts. For example, Heather decided to exercise and lose weight as a New Year’s resolution. She committed to hitting the gym for an hour per day after work.
Exercise Selection for Busy People
If you’ve ever attempted to develop a workout plan on your own, you know how challenging it can be. One of the most difficult parts is determining the right types of exercises to do. Most people don’t have the knowledge or time to figure this out, so they opt for ready-made exercise programs. A major problem with many ready-made programs is that they’re not specifically designed to minimize friction (the inefficient use of time and energy), yet lack of time and energy is a primary reason most busy people don’t exercise consistently.
To pick the right exercises that will fit into your busy life, you should consider only those that provide the maximum amount of benefit in the least amount of time. In other words, you need to choose the most efficient exercises. Taking this approach results in short and effective workouts that minimize friction.
Diet and Nutrition Essentials for Busy People
Diet and nutrition are crucial components of becoming and staying fit. Nutrition refers to the organic compounds food is made of. Diet refers to the foods you rely on for nutrition, specifically, the types and quantities of those foods. In tandem with following an effective exercise routine, consistently eating the right combination of foods with the right nutritional contents is fundamental to achieving your fitness goals.
All the food you consume is made up of substances called macronutrients (a.k.a. macros). Macros are categorized into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. These three macros plus hydration are the four basic building blocks of human nutrition.
Exercise Goals 101
You know that regular exercise is important to staying healthy, being physically fit, and maintaining a good quality of life. However, deciding how much and what types of exercise to do is difficult for most people. Part of the reason is that the type and quantity of exercise someone needs depends on a variety of factors such as age, health status, and lifestyle.
Regardless of your long-term fitness aspirations, if you want to make exercise part of your everyday life, follow these two fundamental recommendations:
- Establish and sustain a procedure for regular exercise that is compatible with your lifestyle.
- Work toward getting the generally recommended amounts of exercise necessary to maintain good health.
Why start with these goals? If you put too much emphasis on physical results initially—such as losing twenty pounds of fat or gaining five pounds of muscle—you might be successful in the short run, but the behaviors required to attain your short-term goals probably won’t be sustainable long term.
Why Should You Care about Diet Culture?
Have you ever felt pressured to achieve an ideal body type? Have you felt a cultural nudge to be the woman with a lean hourglass shape or the man with a broad, muscular chest and thin waistline? If so, you’ve experienced the influence of diet culture, which can be defined as the socially prevalent worship of thinness and the belief that body size is the measure of health, beauty, or morality.
In the Western world, diet culture, which is amplified by social media, is a popular set of ideas that cause many people to feel pressured to push themselves to achieve an idealized physique. Diet culture is a hot-button issue and many people attack it for its negative influences. How can individuals shield themselves from these adverse effects and establish more productive health and fitness goals?