Maintaining your physical fitness as you age is important to living a long healthy life. As your body ages, your bones become weaker, making them more vulnerable to breaks. Keeping fit helps to keep your bones strong, and your body can recover from injuries more quickly. This article will give you some great ideas for maintaining your fitness into your golden years.
In order to achieve the best results from your fitness workout, stay hydrated. It creates stress on your cardiovascular system, which can negatively affect your performance, if you sweat out too much of your body weight. Approximately 2 hours before your workout, drink at least 16 oz (two cups) of fluids. While exercising, drink about 10 oz every 20 minutes: more if it is a high intensity workout. Upon finishing your workout, drink another 16 oz. This may seem like a lot, but it is surprising how dehydrated you can become in a very short time.
One of the most underrated aspects of fitness is a good nights sleep! If you are not well rested how can you ever expect to be motivated and energetic enough for your workout the next day? It also is known by too few individuals that you actually burn calories while sleeping, in fact more so than you do watching television!
Work out your abs without doing crunches. That’s right, all you have to do is to take a deep breath and on the exhale, simply squeeze your belly to your spine and hold it for about 10 seconds. You’ll be working your transversus abdominis muscle, which lays behind more prominent abdominal muscles but can flatten your stomach noticeably.
A great tip to help you stay fit is to go for hikes. Not only will you be burning a lot of calories, you’ll be able to enjoy nature. Some hiking books list all of the hikes in a certain area and they can be a great resource.
Increasing blood circulation is the best way to carry essential nutrients to the cells in our bodies and helps to eliminate toxins and waste built-up in our systems. A good way to improve blood circulation is by simply stretching. Before exercising and increase muscle tone, stretching will help reduce injury.
It is important to remember to stretch properly, before any workout session. Doing so will help your muscles relax before being worked. Remembering to stretch will help you prevent soreness and repair muscle when you are done exercising. It is equally as important to stretch before a work out for the same reasons.
A great fitness tip is to count repetitions backwards. You will not be thinking about how many reps you have done, this will assist you in doing more reps because when you approach the end of a set. Instead, you will be thinking about how many you have left, which can help you squeeze out those last few reps.
Build up your abs through dead lifts and squats. These sets of exercises really provide your abdominal muscles with a thorough workout that really puts them to work and builds them up quickly. They also help to improve your entire body’s posture. That’s another benefit to doing these regularly.
A great fitness tip is to start doing lunges. Lunges are a great exercise to help build up your quadriceps and your hamstrings. You can also perform weighted lunges by holding a dumbbell in each hand. Lunges are definitely an exercise where you’ll feel a deep burn.
Maintaining your physical fitness as you age is important to living a long healthy life, as stated in the beginning of this article. Bones become more brittle as you age, making it harder to recover from injuries. Apply the advice from this article to help maintain your fitness as you get older, and to keep your bones strong and healthy.