As you’ve landed on this page and began to read this guide, you’re eager to be fit and healthy. However, you may not have the time or capacity to hit the gym or go out running. Paired up with a pandemic that’s gripping the country, you may be uncomfortable with working out. Well, let’s start by breaking one of the many fitness myths: No one is ever too busy to get fit.
How so? Because there are many healthy habits you can easily integrate into your everyday life. Habits that will over a period of time keep you fit, energetic and healthy.
Be it workouts or meal/diet planning — you really don’t need a lot of time to optimize your fitness to get results. Whether you’re a busy parent, student or workaholic, you can stay fit and healthy by creating your own schedule and habits.
All the answers you need to create this schedule are included in this guide. So whether you’re stuck at home with little to do or busy beyond belief, we’ve got the solutions that will give your health and personal energy a dramatic and permanent boost.
Work Out
There are several kinds of workouts that are available to you, but it doesn’t mean that every workout is important. Depending on how you are living your life, certain workouts can prove to be more beneficial for you than others.
Here’re some general tips for working out and exercising:
Always Warm-Up And Cool Down
Exercising safely means always spending a few minutes warming up at the start, and a few minutes warming down as you bring your exercise session to an end. Warm ups and warm downs might not be sexy, but they’ll reduce your chance of injury, thus enabling you to exercise more.
Gradually Increase Your Amount Of Exercise
If all the exercise you’ve done for the last few years is to walk around your home and office, then you might not want to think about running a marathon in the next few days!
However, if you set yourself a target of running a marathon in six months, you could gradually build up your fitness (through daily runs) so you’d be ready to run and you’d be ready to cross the finishing line.
Eat A Snack Immediately After Your Workout
It’s good practice to eat protein-heavy snacks within 15 minutes of wrapping up your exercise routine. This can help optimize the healing of the tiny muscle injuries that normally occur while you exercise. Protein is also satiating, which means you’ll be able to resist the temptation to eat junk food later on!
Stay Hydrated
There are many benefits to drinking plenty of fluids (preferably water), but the key benefits when it comes to your fitness are: keeping your body at peak performance, delivering nutrients to your body and regulating your body temperature. If you don’t like drinking lots of plain water, then as an alternative, consider drinking fresh fruit juices.
Home Workouts With No Equipment Needed
This form of exercise don’t require – or require little – equipment nor going to the gym. Some of the reasons to consider these exercises is that they can provide you with a pre or post-workout to cool down or ease yourself into. It’s a similar idea to running on the treadmill after a workout.
Using this as a stand-alone workout plan can also work too in many ways:
- You’ll not have to spend money on memberships. Also, you can realistically spend little to no money at all in doing this.
- It saves you a considerable amount of time. No need to drive, walk, or bike to your local gym. Also because home exercises don’t require much setup you’ll be focusing on moving more rather than putting on weights or getting machines set up to exercise.
- No crowds, meaning no waiting for machines.
- You focus more on the workout itself.
There are several ways to be working out from home as many people have provided video tutorials on home exercises. Also if you want to invest a little bit of money, you can look into cheap equipment like some dumbbells or resistance bands. There are several types of exercises you can do with these things.
- Strength workouts — 12 best at-home workouts that you can use for strength and mobility.
- Build a six-pack — Ways to build six-pack abs from the comfort of your couch!
- Burn that fat — 6 fat burning exercises you can do from home.
Get started right now with your home workout by using our Simple Cardio Home Workout Plan.
You can also make use of one of these13 Best Fitness Apps to Use in the Comfort of Your Home to keep track of your fitness progress at home.
Muscle Building Exercises
We all use our muscles every single day to move, lift, push, pull, and more. Our muscles are important in our everyday function so building them up is very helpful. Even if you live a sedentary lifestyle, building up muscles is further important as stronger muscles allow us to keep a proper posture and not suffer from body aches and pains later on in life.
Muscle-building focuses more on heavier lifting exercises rather than worrying about how many reps you are doing. These sorts of exercises are best done with a trainer or someone who has experience in building muscle as they’ll be able to guide and spot you too so you don’t overexert yourself.
This is ideal because the types of exercises that you’ll be doing rely on lifting, pulling, and swinging. Getting into specifics, exercises like bench presses, deadlift, kettlebell swings, squatting, rear delt flys and general strength training are some of the many exercises that you could be doing.
How working on specific muscle groups can help you in achieving your fitness goals can work in several ways depending on what those goals are. For example, muscle exercises can help with:
- Losing weight since muscles require calories and fat in order to grow. If you’re strengthening your muscles, they’re going to naturally eat away at fat build-up.
- Working specific muscles can also ensure your muscles can keep you locked and supported in specific positions. For example, building back muscles can lead to a straight spine when sitting down. This ensures you mitigate back pain in the future.
As mentioned before, muscle training is something that’s smarter to do with someone else – especially someone who can spot you and can guide you through proper form. However, there are some other tips to consider:
Set expectations before getting into it. Building your ideal dream body isn’t something that’ll be achieved in three months.
The two big factors to easier building muscles and fat loss are your genetic blueprint and your work ethic. For this reason, an Olympic athlete is going to have an easier time building muscle and burning fat than someone who sits around all day.
To build muscle, you’ll need to pay more attention to your protein intake over the number of calories. For those building muscles, it’s not out of the ordinary to be taking in 100 grams or more of protein.
Remember that protein doesn’t have to come from meat. Taking protein shakes over the course of the day can help to cover a good portion of protein intake for the day.
For a more specific guide to building muscle, consider:
- The Ultimate Workout Routine for Men (Tailored for Different Fitness Level)
- The Ultimate 5-Day Workout Routine for Women to Get Strong and Toned
Weight Loss-Focused Exercises
There are several ways to be losing weight beyond simply building up muscle. Building up muscle is a faster way, but also requires you to maintain that muscle too. Skipping out on training for long periods of time can be detrimental.
Fortunately, if you want to be losing weight, one alternative to consider is focusing more on the weight loss-focused exercises. Like the muscle-focused exercises, the upside to these exercises is you’re focusing on the exercises that burn more fat while also improving your overall endurance too.
Some of the common exercises that are done are cardio like jogging, walking, sprinting, or biking (either on machines or out and about town) as well as HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training).
For those who are not familiar with HIIT, it’s a series of exercises that are done in intervals and are at high intensity. What this means is that you’re doing short bursts of exercises within a period of time. Think of doing several jumping jacks before doing a series of sit-ups before taking a short break and starting different or the same exercises again.
Get your weight loss plan and get in shape – Your Ultimate Weight Loss Plan (Workout & Diet)
To help you stay on track with your weight-loss goal, you can make use of these trackers: 8 Wonderful Weight Loss Tracker Apps: Achieve Your Fitness Goals Fast
Stretching for Flexibility
Maybe you already have your ideal body or are generally fit, but you’re suffering from some aches and pains? Stretching can come in handy in these kinds of cases as they provide all kinds of benefits:
- Help in stretching out your muscles to make exercises easier.
- Contribute to improving range of motion for exercises
- Improve your overall posture
- Help to heal back pain
- Reduce muscle soreness
- Prevent injuries
Find out more benefits of strecthing in 15 Important Benefits of Stretching Before, After, and During a Workout.
Stretching is one of the basics in terms of exercising. There are several kinds of stretches that focus on various parts of your body:
- Neck stretches: tilting your head to one side, hold that position with your hand until you feel your neck stretching. Repeat on the other side too.
- Cross-body shoulder stretch: Pull one arm over your chest and keep it straight. Lock it in place with the opposite arm and begin to pull until your shoulder starts stretching.
- Triceps Static stretch: Lift your arms overhead with both arms behind your head and bent at the elbow. Use one hand to pull on the opposite elbow to stretch the triceps.
Grab our 30 Day Resistance Band Full Workout Challenge online guide for FREE to start stretching your body.