When you start aiming for fitness success, it feels as though the path is a straight one. It appears as though the line is clear. After all, to become fit, you just need to exercise, right? Wrong. That’s certainly the core of it, but there are many ways to go about exercising that can help you toward your goal or that can hold you back from doing your best.
Your fitness success may include getting stronger, building lean muscle, burning body fat, or other factors. Perhaps you want to look better in your clothes or have more energy on a regular basis. You may want to be able to take on various activities without becoming exhausted or facing pain. To do so successfully, you need to avoid making certain mistakes or building habits that will be less than your maximum level of effectiveness.
Reach Your Top Fitness Success by Avoiding These Habits
Walking and Only Walking
Walking is a fantastic exercise. It’s a great core workout to do on a regular basis. It’s affordable, easy, and it gets you outside – unless you’re doing it on a treadmill. If you have been essentially sedentary before now, walking is also a great start to getting active. However, once you get going, walking can’t be all you do. For one thing, you need to make sure your walking is intense enough to raise your heart rate. By the end of the walk, you should be breathing heavily, and your heart rate should be high. That said you also need to incorporate strength training and flexibility training or stretching into your complete workout strategy for fitness success.
Eating Too Little
You want to lose fat, so cutting as many calories as you can is the way to do it, right? Wrong again! If you’re hoping to build strength and muscle while burning fat, then you can’t risk eating too little. Too few calories mean you won’t get the performance or the results you’re aiming for. You need to focus on three main things to burn fat while keeping your muscle:
- Eating enough food that you’re not hungry
- Eating enough protein to keep up your muscle instead of burning it
- Eating enough fat for proper body function and nutrient absorption.
To give your body what it needs to burn through its fat stores, it must be fed and nourished to function optimally. Without it, your body – and your fitness success – will slow down. Give your body what it needs to thrive so that it is not only holding itself together just to survive.
