So it’s National Fitness Day, before you switch off, what is fitness?
Straight from the dictionary – it is the quality of being suitable to fulfil a particular role or task. That role or task can be as hard or as easy as is appropriate to you and your lifestyle. The task may even just be life itself.
So gone are the images of ripped bodies and sweaty gyms, think more of what you need to be able to do to fulfil your life. Life contains many stressors and this is a good thing as it forces us to deal with them and adapt. People who deal easily with the stresses of life often look for greater challenges such as sport or physical challenges to artificially increase these stresses. This has the advantage of allowing them to develop and handle more, but to easily reduce the level if life becomes harder.
So hopefully you can see where this is going now. We all want life to be easier, just look at the last little heat wave we had. How many people were wiped out by the weather being nice and hiding indoors away from the evil sun. Being a little fitter gives a little extra capacity for the body to deal with things like the weather being a little hot.
Another angle is something as simple as carrying the shopping, or even lifting it out of the trolley into the car. If this task is difficult then it can wipe you out and make the rest of the day difficult. If you were more fit for task then the shopping would be in the boot without even thinking about it.
So how do you make this magical transformation – if it was that easy, everyone would do it – well hopefully they will. Just do something, anything extra in your life that you dont need to do. It doesn’t matter how little, just do something and then you can build on it.
Clearly everyone has different levels so need to do harder or easier activities. Clearly an Olympian would not benefit much from a walk round the block but someone who never walks anywhere would. Don’t fall in the trap of thinking that you would like to do something but don’t have the time to make it worthwhile, in the time that you have procrastinated, you could have done something.
Some really easy things to increase fitness in ascending order:
Make sure you get enough sleep and drink enough water
Increase the amount of walking you do (end of the street and back)
Stand up and sit down five times
Stand and jump up and down ten times
Do five press ups
These are all very low level examples and if you are not confident to start or have an existing medical condition it may be worth speaking to your GP before starting, but very few people would not benefit from an increase in physical activity.
Once you have started and then adapted to the new level of activity then you can increase and hey presto you are getting fitter.
Just as an aside, we do run Pilates and strengthening classes.
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