7 Proven Methods To Stay Fit And Improve Your Life

The term "physical fitness" describes a human body that can function without becoming too fatigued. That is, the body stores enough energy to work, play, and meet physical stresses with awareness and vigor. Your level of alertness, endurance and strength, heart rate, and blood pressure are good indicators of your physical fitness.

Beyond these basic measures, your degree of coordination, flexibility, and agility also reflect how fit you are. Doctors use stress testing to measure your body's ability to respond to sustained powerful physical demands to analyze your physical fitness and diagnose problems.

Regular systematic exercise is one way to condition the body and improve physical fitness. Daily moderate activity can maintain your body's ability to cope with the ordinary stresses of life without injury or illness. But to improve health and fitness, most people need to adopt and stick to a regular, intensive exercise program to promote improved vitality and maintain high-functioning physiological systems.

Here are seven tips that will help you improve your health and the quality of your life:

1. Exercise daily. Whether through a formal workout or through normal activities, you should do things that raise your heart rate. Aerobic routines are an excellent way to raise your heart rate over a period of time, but you can accomplish the same goal when you attend to household and work chores. Making healthy choices, like walking instead of driving, can raise your heart rate. Using a push lawn mower and climbing stairs instead of using the elevator are also excellent examples of things you can do to exercise every day.

2. Eat more fruits and vegetables. The convenience of fast and processed foods is a threat to your good health. Try to establish and follow a better diet that contains plenty of dark green vegetables and fruit. They provide energy, essential nutrients, and fiber. Try to find organic products that have not been treated with chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

3. Train with weights. Strength training builds healthy muscles and bones and increases endurance. Working out with weights can be as simple as using hand-held dumbbells or as complicated as state-of-the-art weight training machines. Weight training not builds strength but also helps you reduce body fat and develop more defined muscles.

4. Try circuit training. When you circuit train, you combine weight training with aerobic exercises to get a more balanced workout. You build muscle strength and tone as well as getting a good cardiovascular workout. In rapid succession, you go through a set of strength-building weight exercises, then aerobic movements like squats, push-ups, trusts, or jumping jacks. When you finish the cycle, you begin again with the weights and repeat the circuit.

5. Train functionally. Originally used to rehabilitate people with severe injuries to return to their jobs and normal life, functional training exercises mimic everyday movements and activities. Focusing on the abdominal muscles and back, it may involve weight training to tone muscles or other exercises to improve coordination, flexibility, and agility.

6. Stretch your muscles. Especially important for a warm-up before strenuous exercise, resistance training that uses elastic tension to strengthen and tone muscles through sustained stretching. Stretching helps improve flexibility and strength and gives you greater mobility and range of motion. It also decreases your risk of injury. Stretching before and after strenuous exercise prevents strain, warms up the heart rate, and makes your muscles more flexible.

7. Get plenty of fluids. Our bodies are mostly water, and water is the most essential nutrient for life. When we exercise, we lose water and important minerals that keep our muscles well-toned and our brains sharp and clear. Every human being should drink at least two quarts of water every day, and more active people should drink more. Those on detox diets, who are clearing impurities and toxins from their bodies, should drink four quarts of water a day. Some drinks - coffee, tea, soda, and alcohol - cause dehydration and should not be consumed during or after exercise. This is why many professional trainers and sports physicians recommend drinking so-called sports drinks. They contain not only water, but essential minerals that are depleted during exercise.


These simple strategies will help keep your body fit and healthy, yet it's easy to lose sight of their importance to daily living. People fail to integrate regular exercise into their routine for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they feel time pressures due to family and work demands. Or maybe they think they have to join a gym to get healthy exercise. Maybe they are interested in other hobbies and interests they're not willing to "sacrifice" for the sake of exercise. Unfortunately, exercise is not a luxury. It's a necessary part of maintaining good health and fitness.

Consider the costs of not exercising enough:
- more injuries from poor coordination and agility
- more illnesses due to impaired resistance
- greater physical and psychological stress
- greater likelihood of poor health resulting from being overweight or obese
- limited mental agility and clarity
- greater vulnerability to specific serious diseases (diabetes, heart disease, etc.)
- greater likelihood of needing major surgery later in life

The truth is we can't afford not to get regular exercise. Being physically fit isn't just a way to keep a toned, sexy body. It's a way to build and have a better quality of life. Exercise doesn't just improve you physically. It improves your emotional balance and helps you cope with common stresses. It promotes positive, healthy attitudes and transforms negative thinking. It helps you work through destructive emotions like anger, thereby reducing consequences of ill-advised behavior. It makes you a better, more vibrant companion for family and friends, and it relieves boredom.

So next time you plan and set priorities for your day, put exercise and fitness at the top of your list!