Not just good advice in a fire or the repeated refrain of an overworked teacher on corridor patrol - this is both excellent fitness AND general life advice.
First from a fitness standpoint: now I know this might attract some controversy. Runners are a fanatical bunch and will wax lyrical for hours about the runner's high, their super low resting heart rate and a whole plethora of reasons which make running THE BEST form of exercise. But please just hear me out.
1. It's true I personally dislike running for a range of reasons which I don't need to go into here, but more importantly:
2.Running is a great form of exercise. Yes you heard me, it's great for cardiovascular health, it's excellent for endurance and few activities require the discipline needed to get up at some silly hour in the freezing cold and rain and go for a jog through dark streets. It's a great with a caveat though: you need to be at a certain level of fitness OR absolutely love running for it to work.
For everybody else it's just not worth it. The amount of misery most people feel when starting out running means they are unlikely to stick with it. The amounts of pain most people feel when first starting running means that those £300 ASIC trainers they bought with all those good intentions end up gathering dust in the bottom of a cupboard.
Secondly, there's the high chance of injury. From shin splints to sprained ankles, twisted knees to pulled hamstrings - the number of injuries suffer e by newbie runners are astronomical guess what happens with pain and injuries? That's right... Dusty ASICS!
Now I would never deter a client from doing any form of exercise, but for clients just starting out on their fitness journey I would always encourage them to start of with the simplest, most risk averse exercise of all... Walking!
Start off with aiming for 6 thousand steps a day and build up.
Make sure you aim for a quarter of your walking at a brisk pace.
It will surprise you how effective this is at not only helping achieve fitness goals (especially early on) but also at how good this is for general mood and wellbeing.
Fitness aside, this motto also works for anything we are trying to achieve.
Often we are motivated to change due to external factors; the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job.
It can be tempting to think that wholesale change is needed (I mean, sometimes it is) but the issue with trying to change everything all at once is that we can become overwhelmed with our new choices.
Starting to exercise more, quitting drinking, stopping smoking, eating better, starting a new a job... These are all great ideas but if we do them all at once it can be too much. And when we fail at one thing? It all comes crashing down and we're back where we started but with added guilt and a sense of failure to boot.
Instead, walk before we run and change one thing, one small step at a time can make changes we could never have imagined.
Be Lucky x
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