6 Fitness and Health Tips for Staying Fit

There’s no shortcut to maintaining good fitness and health — but if done the right way, you are looking at a long and healthy life.

Your dietary habits and physical activity are linked, and one greatly influences the other. This relationship is a complex one; so it means you won’t always hit the fitness and health goals you strive for, and that’s OK.

Maintaining good fitness and health levels, and staying fit is not about the goals as much as it is about the journey. It should be a journey with purpose, but it also needs to be in a way that doesn’t put a burden on your mental health.

Knowing your body and taking the right steps is what counts whether you are trying to:

• Build muscles 
• Shed fat ‍
• Increase flexibility 
• Tone up
• Improve overall fitness and health levels 
• Boost endurance

In other words, learn what works for you and stay true to your journey. Rely on our fitness and health tips below and you’ll keep getting better at it.

1. Add Variety to Your Exercise Routine 

Even if you set your mind to staying fit, you may gain momentum at one time and lose it at another. This happens even to professional athletes, so it’s no surprise that they are always prepared with ways to overcome this. The keyword is – variety.

Consistency is not based on willpower only. It’s about giving yourself a nudge when needed. One way to do so is to break your exercise routine with different exercise styles. Variety feels good every so often. 

Many training activities are complementary in ways you wouldn’t think possible. For example: 

• Try dumbbell leg exercises alongside high-intensity interval training (HIIT). 

• Complement your regular dumbbells training with Pilates (it’s how you’ll work different sets of muscles).

• To get your body in better shape for running, add some strength training for your legs and core. 

Another good idea is to switch up the duration of your workout, but anything that gets your mojo going will work.   

2. Try Red Light Therapy 

Those who are committed to improving their fitness and health are always on the lookout for new ways to make their exercise more effective.  

Investing more effort is not necessarily bound to bring you better results.

Weight training four times a week alone won’t help your muscles grow.  Giving your body some time off on top of it and letting them recover will.

As will red light therapy. Red and near-infrared light therapy build on your hard work by enhancing your muscle growth and muscle recovery.

It’s a healthy way to stay fit. How’s that? It draws on your body’s natural metabolic processes, and it does this in three ways:

• Boosts your strength training results. A 1RM leg-press test showed significantly higher muscle performance in those who used a combination of strength training and red and near-infrared therapy. There was an increase of 55% in the 1RM leg-press test in those individuals. 

• Cuts down on recovery time. When you put your body through the stress of exercise, it starts producing serum lactate.

It’s a “body cop” of sorts that works in a way by slowing your down before you hurt yourself. Red light therapy clears up your serum lactate levels and speeds up muscle recovery. 

• Improves your results with eccentric exercise. A series of tests demonstrated that red and near-infrared therapy both improve exercise performance and accelerate post-exercise recovery in eccentric exercise. 

3. Keep to a Balanced Diet Regimen

A healthy diet is a fuel that helps you maintain good fitness and health, and reach A-level results. Drop this out of the equation, and it can throw you off the track. Sticking to it is like running long-distance. 

The trick is to save your strength for when the rough patch ensues.  

Keeping to healthy eating will boost your energy levels and general wellbeing so you’re able to maintain your fitness motivation in the long run. 

Maintain a balanced, versatile diet consisting of vegetables, fruits, proteins, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats.  

4. Boost Workout Intensity If Pressed For Time

You won’t always be able to fit your exercise routine into your daily schedule no matter how religiously you’re dedicated to staying fit. There will be ebbs and flows, much like in other domains of your life. 

So, let’s say you’ve been adhering to a strength exercise routine three times a week and have complemented it with the NHS-recommended 150 minutes of moderate activity a week. At crunch time, opt to cut this down to 75 minutes but saturate this time with vigorous activity.    

• Swap moderate cycling or walking for more strenuous running or walking up the stairs. 

• Create a mash-up of say 60 minutes of vigorous cardio and 30 minutes of moderate exercise. 

If you haven’t tried it so far, look into high-intensity interval training (HIIT). By raising the bar higher and intensifying your cardio workout, you’ll get the same result in less time.

5. Add Resistance and Balance Training to Maintain Your Muscle Fitness 

Poor organization and lack of motivation are not the only factors that can stand in your way of staying fit. Aging can also mess with your plans. It’s not necessarily indicative of loss of good shape or even stamina, but it can influence your muscles.

As we age, we start losing muscle mass. The hormonal system in your body creates signals for muscle growth and teardown and keeps them in balance. As a result of aging, your body becomes resistant to growth signals, which leads to muscle loss.  

As always, smart training plays a critical role. If you’re looking for training fitness and health tips that target this problem, resistance exercises are the typical advice you’ll find. 

Resistance exercises aid your muscular fitness and hold off muscle loss. They use external resistance to exercise your muscles—and you can use anything from dumbbells and exercise tubing to resistance bands and your own body weight.

Balance is also affected as we grow older. With that said, an odd balance exercise will be a great addition that keeps you on the winning streak even as you approach old age.  

6. Don’t Play Your Injuries Down 

Taking it on the chin is the only way to go if you’re cultivating a sportsman spirit, but playing a hero when this isn’t due is nothing more than counterproductive. 

Minding your injuries (even the mildest ones) prevents worse-case scenarios from happening and keeps you fit and healthy in the long haul.  

If you’re feeling soreness or discomfort and this keeps bothering you, it’s best to let your body heal. So, ease back on training for a few days. You’ll be doing your future self a favor. 

The best tip you can get for staying fit is that once you find a routine that suits you, keep treading the path. 

Whichever modality of exercise and diet suits your style, red light therapy will help you achieve your fitness and health goals. 

Want better results? 

Red and near-infrared therapy can boost your body’s natural healing systems and stimulate your muscle growth, muscle recovery, and pain relief. But there’s more to it. By healing bones, tendons, and wounds, red LED therapy helps you recover faster from injuries so you can get back to your routine more quickly. 

However, red light therapy benefits go way beyond this. Find out more about how FlexBeam can be your best choice for staying fit.