Too Busy For Health? Do This...

Being busy doesn’t have to mean you forgo your health, and actually getting your body firing fully will give you more energy (yes really), more focus, and massively increase your daily productivity. How useful would that be?

Obviously using a personal trainer will short cut the process for you, and also ensure you keep consistent and don’t hurt yourself in the process.

I’ve been a personal trainer Warwick, and personal trainer Stratford Upon Avon for the past 14 years, training clients in their own homes and providing simple but effective solutions to help change health, lose body fat, and create the body and well being they desire.

However, if you’re not currently at the point of hiring a personal trainer here are three good habits you can do in the meantime that will help you.

1. Water intake

Water does a lot more than just quench thirst, it’s essential to the healthy operation of our body, nearly all of your body’s major systems depend on water. It carries nutrients and oxygen to cells, helps the kidneys and liver flush waste products, and helps your brain to function! These are just a few of a big list, see here for a bigger picture.

Water intake level varies depending on exercise level, bodyweight, and age. But as a guide, men need to aim for 3 litres a day, and women 2.2 litres a day.

If your water intake has been low then I suggest you gradually increase your intake over a couple of weeks. By suddenly jumping from 1 litre to 3 litres the body can’t actually absorb the extra water and just gets rid of it, meaning lots of toilet trips for you!

Try adding an extra glass a day until you reach your daily intake level.

This one tip alone will make you feel completely different, more alert and mentally refreshed.

1. Sleep

This is a tough one, especially if you have a young family. But rest is so important, it’s when our body rebuilds and repairs, and also when memories are “downloaded”. Obviously it would be great if we could all get 8-9 hours sleep a night, in reality that will be unlikely for some, if not all, of you. So instead let’s look to maximise your sleep performance with the hours you do get.

Avoid caffeine after 2pm, use a blue light filter on phones/tablets and laptops where possible, ideally don’t use any screen based device within 2 hours of going to bed (the light emitted confuses the brain and can reduce the amount of melatonin being produced - that’s the sleep hormone) and think about doing a close of day review/notes for tomorrow, this gets ideas and to do’s out of your head, if you’re trying to sleep with an active mind you will not get to sleep very quickly.

1. Get clear on your daily calorie intake (and stick to it)

Sounds straightforward, in reality it’s tricky and takes commitment to do. For a 6-8 week period use a calorie tracking tool to learn how much food you should be eating. From my experience as a personal trainer I see most people overeat, and most of them don’t even realise it. You only need to be over your intake by 200 calories a day to be in a position where you’ll put on 2-3lbs of body fat a month - take that out 12 months, 2 years, 5 years,10 years, this is where your consistent fat gain comes from.

I’ve done this myself, and continue to do it from time to time, and I’m always surprised how easy it is to overshoot your daily intake.

These three tips will work if you take action of them consistently. The results are always worth the effort, but be prepared for your body to try and pull you away from these new habits, change requires effort and energy, to the body this is bad, it would much rather you stay doing what you’ve always done, as that’s easy and requires little extra effort.

Real results come when you feel the resistance to doing what you know you ought to do, but you keep doing anyway in spite of that inner voice saying “give it up, it’s too difficult”.