Everything in life is about balance. In our modern world, leading an active lifestyle becomes a true act of self-care – it improves your fitness level, gives you a daily energy boost and helps stay healthy. Adding a regular exercise routine in your life can reduce the risk of such conditions as diabetes, heart stroke or heart disease. It is also known to positively affect your mental health and brain activity.
Active living means integrating physical activity into your everyday life. You don’t have to run a marathon or win a sport competition in order to improve your health and wellbeing – small steps and changes in your daily routine will be enough. Living a healthy life means staying active in the way that is beneficial and comfortable for your organism – everyone’s lifestyle is different, so it is a good idea to listen to your body in order to figure out how much activity is good for you.
Although everyone’s exercise capacity is different, there are a few common pieces of advice you could use in order to comfortably integrate physical activity into your life.
How to Become More Active – 5 Tips
Find something you enjoy
In order to turn trainings into a pleasant and natural part of your life, you need to find something you truly enjoy doing. Think about different kinds of physical activity and how you could successfully integrate them into your daily schedule. Will it be a morning run? Or should you take a bike to work instead of hopping on a bus? Go to a swimming pool for a few times a week? Or maybe have a quite evening yoga sessions when you are at home?
You can choose anything that appeals to you – the important thing is to get yourself moving. It may be not so easy to find your perfect activity on the first try – after some time you may feel the need to change your workout style. It is perfectly okay to do so. Moreover, it’s actually a good strategy to switch – it helps your brain stay excited for a new experience, and lets your body enjoy various activities.
Take it slow
Every new and exciting thing you try – may it be learning a language, working on new hobbies, or engaging into physically active lifestyle – usually comes with a lot of positive emotions and energy, which are excessively released at the very start of your activity. It moments like this, it is easy to overestimate your enthusiasm and overload yourself with a lot of plans and tasks.
In order to prevent getting burnt out, start slow. If you haven’t been physically active in several years, too much sudden pressure won’t do any good for your organism. Talk to your doctor before following an exercise plan. Generally, it is better to start off with only 5-10 minutes of exercising per day. Over time, you can gradually increase the length of your sessions.
30 Minutes Per Day
Researchers say that your goal for living an active lifestyle is to be physically active for 30 minutes per day. This could be easily divided into three separate 10-minutes sessions. You can try:
- Dancing for 10 minutes at home
- Taking a walk on your free time
- Doing some yoga in the morning or evening
Don’t Overpay
Fitness is a product for sale, just like everything else. However tempting it might be to buy all the new equipment or to get the fanciest gym membership, those are more likely to distract you at the beginning of your journey. In order to stay active, you don’t need any equipment at all – walking, exercising with video tutorials, going for a run – all of those things are available anytime, so don’t wait till you finally buy something. Start now. This will help you save some money and also prevent feeling guilty if you won’t be able to use your new commodities as you planned to at first.
Stretch
Stretching improves your flexibility and prevents possible traumas or injuries. Make it a part of your fitness routine – always do a little stretching before and after your exercises. There are plenty of tutorials that would help you learn proper stretching techniques – take a look at what the Internet has to offer or talk to a trainer for some advice.