4 Surprising Fitness Tips You Need To Know
I’m sure you’ve read a hundred fitness tips over the years – I know I have. Some are good valid tips, while others lack reasoning or research. These tips below are the Ascend Team’s favorite fitness tips that you need to know. Try one or all of them and let us know how it works with your routine!
Tip #1: Get 30 minutes of exercise daily
The American Heart Association recommends that you get at least 30 minutes of exercise each day!
Getting your body moving and blood flowing has shown amazing benefits to your overall health and longevity of life. Regular exercise can reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, certain types of cancers. It can also improve overall mood and decrease stress levels, and even strengthen your bones.
Tip #2: Always warm-up and cool down
A warm-up and cool down are important parts of your workout! Warming up is used to get the blood flowing throughout the body. It also helps increase the heart rate slowly so your body can get ready for higher intensity exercise. A warm-up is also important in helping prevent injuries to muscles. Getting the blood pumping to your muscles will help them to stretch out and prepare for the workout.
The same goes for your cool down. Cooling down after a workout is important to allow the heart rate to slowly lower to a resting rate. Stretching your muscles post workout is also very important as this will help prevent injury as well as increase flexibility in those muscles.
Tip #3: Try out interval training
Have you hit a plateau in your weight loss or workout routine? If you consistently do the same workouts every day, you could hit a plateau in your regimen and adding in some intervals could be just the trick for you.
Interval training can be done many ways. It can be done as strict cardio with doing a walk jog on the treadmill or adding sprints into your run. Or it can also be added into your basic workout routine by adding some cardio exercise into the mix of strength training. You can even try doing 30 seconds of cardio after a strength exercise then taking a rest before your next set.
Feel free to ask a staff member if you have questions. As said before, there are many different ways to add interval training into your workout and we would love to give you some tips and tricks!
Tip #4: Engage your core
During any workout, especially strength training, you want to make sure you’re engaging your core. Keeping your core engaged throughout your workouts will not only act as added core exercise, but also help your body to utilize the proper muscles you want to focus on in the lift, as well as help protect your back from injury.
To make sure you’re properly using your core, thing about pulling your belly button into your spine. Keep that tight feeling for a rep, breathe and relax the core. When you go into the next rep, re-tighten the core. It is important to give your core a rest between reps to ensure it’s engaged properly for each rep.
Ascend is here to help
There are many fitness tips that are constantly going around, from making sure you have proper form, to reminding you to drink your water while exercising. These four are some basic tips and concepts that you should take into each workout and be a good base or starting point on your fitness journey.
Our staff at Ascend is always around to help, and if one of us isn’t able, we will find another staff that can. We want you to be your best here at Ascend and using these tips will help keep that body moving! If you’re not sure exactly where to start, Ascend also offers some incredible classes that you could take part in. Check out the classes available HERE.
