New Year, New You! - 3 Small Lifestyle Changes for Wellness
This January don't set yourself up to fail. Start your journey to wellness with some small changes to your lifestyle and see where it takes you. Our head Personal Trainer, Michael Adu, has provided 3 simple steps to wellness focusing on 3 easy exercises, 3 healthy eating tips and 3 meditations to help boost your endorphins, improve your fitness, detox and de-stress you for the New Year.
3 mini workouts
- 30-minute walk- walking is an exercise that virtually anyone can do. To get the best from this exercise, you need to be walking at a pace which causes you to become hot, to the point of sweating.
- Climbing stairs- climbing stairs is a fantastic workout for the legs, glutes and core. It can also be a great cardiovascular workout. Set yourself a workout time (from 5 minutes onwards) and see how many stairs you can climb
- Ad break workouts- whilst watching TV, you can utilise the breaks between your favourite programme to do a quick workout. Great exercises for ad breaks could be squats, press ups or planks. The choice is yours
3 eating tips
- Have your smallest meal for dinner- as this is the end of the day, there is no need to have a calorific meal. Most will be converted into storage as you are not given a chance to burn it off
- Have a colourful plate- the more colour from natural foods (vegetables, grains, legumes, fruit etc.), the better and more nutritious the food is. Each colour type has different positive effects on the body so the more colour in your food, the healthier it is for your body.
- Limit the alcohol intake- Being careful with how much alcohol you consume is important. The empty calories in alcohol can have a serious effect of your goals and overall health.
3 mini meditations
- Box breathing- great for anxiety, stress reduction and mental calmness. Example of box breathing is breathe in for 3 seconds, hold breathe for 3 seconds, breathe out for 3 seconds and hold breathe for 3 seconds. Continue with this for 5 minutes and you will calm and relaxed after.
- 4-7-8 breathing- this is good for releasing any emotional experience you are feeling and bring you back down to a balanced state. The more you exhale, the more energy/emotion you are releasing. Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds and exhale for 8 seconds.
- Belly Breathing- great for cleansing the system of toxins and waste. Whilst breathing through the nose, work on expanding your stomach (belly button) out as much as you can on your inhalation, and release on your exhalation.