Any worthwhile personal trainer or gym specialist will tell you that what you do outside of the gym is just as important, if not more so, than what you do inside of it. For instance, you can have the most perfect weightlifting form, the best workout plan exactly suitable for your goals, but if you don’t eat properly and most importantly rest as much as your body needs, you will either overtrain at best or exhaust yourself significantly at worst.
For this reason, no health plan or self-improvement regimen is complete unless it carefully coincides what you do when you rack the weights or stop using that piece of gym equipment, or perhaps how you store your running shoes at the end of the day.
This much is perhaps a little obvious, but it’s worth going over the less common forms of health upkeep so that over time, we can curate an approximate plan for living healthier, feeling better, and attending to our responsibilities where appropriate.
Keep Hydrated
It’s always essential to stay hydrated outside of the gym, especially if you’re becoming more physically active, and even if that simply means walking around a shopping mall all day. Hydration is essential. It’s recommended that men drink 3.7 litres of water a day, and women drink 2.7 litres, but it’s true that if you’re working out, you lose fluids, and so making sure you replace them during your exercise is key. However, outside of the gym, you may also glean benefits from reducing the sugar intake in the drinks you enjoy, and perhaps even adding electrolytes if you fast intermittently.
Limit Your Vices
A fit and healthy lifestyle is often just as much about what you choose not to do rather than what you choose to do. That’s not to say you can get in-shape by simply not eating fast food, some work in the right direction is required. However, if you’re trying to train your cardio and you smoke, or if you have a huge sweet tooth but are trying to lose weight, or perhaps your drinking is slightly less controlled than you’d like it to be, then focusing on limiting your vices and managing them either completely soberly or in moderation is essential. This may require the exact same amount of mental energy you invested into planning your workout routine.
Attend To Your Health Checkups
Utlimately, while we can help our health and live in a manner that feels great, gives us radiant energy and allows us to focus with more clarity, fitness experts are not always medical experts. For this reason, it’s important to make sure you have a healthy relationship to a yearly physical, to be checked out for potential health issues as time goes on or should you notice a small change, to visiting your best dentist regularly so that problems can be assuaged well in advance. All of this makes a difference.
With this advice, you’re sure to continue caring for your health outside of the gym, even if the gym is a great part of sustaining a healthy lifestyle.
