8 Simple Ways to Make Working Out Worth It – Struggle Less, Gain More
Exercise isn’t just about what you do, it’s how you do it. These are simple ways to make working out worth it. Gain health benefits for both your mind and body easily with these effective tips.
Daily movement is the key to wellness. Check out these tips that help make working out worth it, with easy to do habits. Exercise is about praising what we can do, not punishing ourselves and these tips help us keep this in mind.
8 Simple Ways to Make Working Out Worth It
Without further ado, here are eight simple ways to make working out worth it. Plus, stick around to the end to read about a bonus tip that may save your fitness journey!
1. Skip the Gym
Whoever said you needed a gym to work out well lied to you. Just think about calisthenics, a type of exercise that uses your own body weight to train. Plus, in today’s modern age of technology, there are millions of home workout videos that you can do from the comfort of your living room.
Don’t let a gym membership stop you from working out. It may even be more comfortable to start at home if you’re a beginner. You can even shop around your local area for week-long gym passes to try out certain gyms. You always have to look for a place that you enjoy being at, and not all gyms are created equally.
2. Feast on Protein
If you’re going to track one thing in your wellness journey, let It be protein. Protein is essential when you’re working out. Even if you’re doing cardio, you need the amino acids in protein to help heal your body after exercise. Protein is even more important if you do any sort of weight or resistance training. Again, this is because your body needs the amino acids and protein to help repair the muscles and make them grow.
Prioritize protein in your meals. Make sure you have at least a palm-sized portion of protein. Protein is very good for you since it takes longer for the body to digest protein when compared to other macronutrients. This means that protein can help you burn more energy simply while you eat and rest. Having a good amount of protein in the diet prevents your body from sapping nutrients from your already existing muscles.
3. Keep Carbs
People love to get rid of carbs when on a wellness journey. They think of carbs as the enemy. Personally, I did keto for about a year or two, and while it was a good way to remove a lot of junk from my diet, I missed bread. So there’s no need for anyone to get rid of carbs completely. Carbs are a great way to fuel the body and provide fast energy for your workouts.
Carbs are particularly important if you are looking to gain muscle or maintain your weight. If you are working out, your body needs more energy. If you are looking to lose weight, however, you may benefit from something known as carb cycling. This is when you eat carbs before you workout, then have the next day be lower carb. It’s a bit more complex than this so check out this complete guide here on carb cycling. You can use carb cycling to increase muscle, lose weight, maintain weight, and more.
4. Find Something You Love
As I stated above, exercise should be a celebration of the movement, not a punishment for the body. What better way to celebrate yourself and your body than to find something you like to do? For example, if you hate running, why are you going to train to run? That’ll just make you miserable. You want to try to find something you love.
Some forms of exercise don’t even feel like exercise. I do weekly Zumba classes over the weekend, and in those classes, I have a lot of fun. You barely notice that you’re working out. Some people might like swimming, some people hiking, while others may like skating. Different strokes for different folks.
5. Moving Meditations
If you want to really make working out worth it, let’s hit two birds with one stone. How about trying a form of moving meditation exercise? Another name for this is yoga.
I would consider yoga and moving meditation. It is a way to connect the breath, mind, and body. There are a lot of benefits to yoga such as training the muscles, improving posture, increasing flexibility, and many more. This is because of the different poses that you hold during the yoga session. Best of all, you don’t need to find a class or go to the gym to do yoga. There are millions of at-home yoga practices that you can do in your bedroom or living room. It’s a great way to get some mental benefits while moving the body.
6. Try a Quick Session
No time to work out? No problem! You can still work out. There’s something called HIIT sessions, or high-intensity interval training. These are a great way to work out in just 15 to 20 minutes.
Best of all, high-intensity interval training has many benefits. They are one of the best-known ways to increase our VO2 max. This is a measurement of how the body supplies oxygen during more intense movement and exercise. Increasing our VO2 max is surely far way for us to experience many cardiovascular health benefits further down the line.
7. Green Smoothie it Up
If you’re like me, then one of the biggest roadblocks to wellness is nutrition. Trying to eat nutrient-dense meals all the time is a bit exhausting. That’s where green smoothies come into play. Green smoothies are a delicious way to get a lot of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients.
Green smoothies are very customizable. You can change them up to suit your specific fitness goals. They can be made lower in calories, higher, or with other needs in mind. They’re even ways to make these green smoothies very high in protein. Check out a full guide on how to make delicious and nutritious green smoothies here.
8. Track Progress
Working out is worth it. However, we tend to forget it if we have been on a fitness journey for a long time and don’t see progress. This might just be an illusion. That’s why to make working out worth it, track your progress. This doesn’t mean we’re lying on a scale, or measuring your waist.
There are many different ways to track your progress that won’t cause body dysmorphia or other issues. You can simply track push-ups for example. If you start your journey only by being able to do one push-up and then later increase the five or more, then you know you’re making progress. We need to write it down and be able to have a visual representation of it.
Bonus: Switch Things Up
Working out may become tedious as time goes on. Here’s a bonus tip that you can try, switch things up. If you usually jog, try swimming. If you’re someone who likes to do Zumba, let’s add some weight training to your regimen. Switching things up can keep things exciting and will help you learn new skills that you can use in your everyday life.
The Takeaway
These are simple ways to make working out worth it. Working out is about gaining health benefits for the mind and body. It’s about taking time to do something that benefits you. These simple yet effective tips and habits will make the journey much more rewarding, so try them out today.
Remember, health always comes from within. Start by eating nutritious food, moving your body, exercising when you can, and caring for your mental health. These small daily changes and habits that you start to cultivate become the foundation for a life full of wellness. Don’t forget about the health of your microbiome, too! Gut microbiota affects everything in your body, from the skin to muscles to the immune system and mental health. Get all the resources you need about microbiota health for free here!
