|
A message from Founder and Owner, Coach Tristan Mitchell: Happy New Year! - 2022 is here and with the beginning of a new year many of us will have resolutions and goals of a healthier and more active year. For these resolutions to become life long habits it is vital that they become a part of our day-to-day life. There’s no finish line to this pursuit, it’s about finding consistency that you can maintain for a lifetime. In my mind sustainability and consistency is about the pursuit of movement in a way that builds the body and maintains the body over the long haul. People looking to get in shape often jump into high intensity training programs which have a tendency to wash too many out with overtraining, fatigue, and injuries. Getting after it with high intensity workouts should be part of the approach, but should be sprinkled in with more consistent lower intensity work as the foundation of your fitness and health. This can look like a lot of things and can benefit from variety – walking (daily step goals are a no brainer), strength training (focused on strong movement fundamentals), running, cycling, swimming, yoga, Pilates, etc. are all ways to increase daily movement and none of these necessarily need to be high intensity. Finding a form (or a few) of daily movements that you can stick to consistently is the key. One of the easiest forms of movement and a great goal for everyone is a daily step goal of 8,000 steps (or about 4 miles of walking). If you’re leaving the house and working in an office there’s a good chance that you’ll get about 3k steps in a day just through the walking required to get to and around your office. To get our remaining steps in it generally takes a plan to get to 8k. A great place to start is walking after meals, shooting for 10min after each meal. If you’re eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner that’s 30min of walking which will get you around 3k more steps. Now we’re down to about 2k more to go (you can see this takes a little effort!). We’ll need to find creative ways to add in more steps – take a call or have a meeting while on walk vs just sitting at your desk, park further away from the door of your office, walk to and from lunch instead of driving – point being, if you plan ahead and get creative you can get your steps in and enjoy the health benefits! Beyond walking, we want consistent strength training. Working and loading our body through full ranges of motion, exposing our joints and tissues to various positions regularly. You can make this easy by coming into Lions Den for your workout! If that’s not doable though, lets look at the basic shapes of strength training (and movement!) that we want to get in as often as possible - hinge (squat, deadlift), press (push-ups, overhead press), pull (pull-up, row), single leg/lunge (split squat, step-up, SL deadlift, cossack squat), farmer walk (and it’s variations, pick-up some weight and walk with it). If we check each one of these boxes on a regular basis we will cover a lot of ground as far as our general strength and health is concerned. Strength training does not need to be time consuming. An example of a workout could be as simple as a 10min warmup and then 3 rounds of 10 goblet squat, 10 overhead press, 10 single leg deadlifts - the squats will load the entire body, working the hips, knees, and ankles through deeper ranges of motion than typical day-to-day movement will. The overhead press exposes the shoulder joint and tissues to an overhead position (this will help maintain access to this shape and help maintain long term shoulder health - use it or lose it!). Lastly, the single leg deadlift will help build greater single leg stability, hip, hamstring, and core strength. Ideally we do these movements out of our shoes and gain the added benefit of building stronger feet and ankles. A workout like this can easily be accomplished in 30 minutes, and will help build and/or maintain lean muscle mass and improve metabolic health. We can add to walking and strength training in so many ways - I’m partial to running myself but there are countless ways to incorporate more movement into your daily life. With walking and strength training as your foundation you can find whatever other form of exercise, movement, or sport you enjoy the most and add that to your daily routine. The importance of daily exercise can not be overstated, movement is ingrained into our DNA, it’s something that at one point in our evolutionary history was unavoidable and essential to survival. In today’s world it’s essential that we have a plan to prioritize and incorporate movement and exercise into our lives, this is how a resolution turns into a lifestyle and that lifestyle will upgrade your life in every way. If you have questions or want to discuss how you can to best incorporate exercise into your everyday life reach out to us today!
|
