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.
The key to being fit is to stay motivated. If you find that you don’t have enough time throughout the day to go to the gym then try waking up early and do some exercise before work. You can run and do push ups and sit ups as a workout to start out your day.
Keep your neck safe when you are doing crunches by sticking your tongue to your upper palate. It also helps if you look at the ceiling instead of at your legs. This helps you to focus energy on those core muscles that should be getting the workout, not your neck.
Keep track of your workouts. Keeping a daily or weekly log, tracking all of your workouts, ensures that you are making progress in your exercises and it will help hold you accountable. Write down things, such as duration, frequency, weight sizes and sets, reps and how your workout made you feel.
Add resistance training to your exercise plan. Resistance training helps build muscle. The more muscle you have in your body, the more quickly and efficiently you can burn calories. Resistance bands or light weights are good options for working out at home. You can also use your own body weight to provide resistance. Exercises, such as push-ups and squats, make your muscles bear the weight of your body and that builds strength.
Performing multiple reps of double dips can help you to achieve stronger triceps, but they can also be tweaked to work more on the muscles in your chest. To enhance your triceps, straighten your body and perform each dip with your elbows pointed inward. To focus on the chest muscles, position your elbows outward and lean forward while performing the dip.
This unexpected move can effectively improve your running form: Instead of running more slowly for longer distances, do just the opposite. Increasing your speed while running shorter distances will help you to build more muscle tone and increase your endurance. This move will also make you less susceptible to sprains, strains, and other injuries.
Test the flexibility of your hip flexors by keeping your heels flat on the ground while you do your squats. If this cannot be done, they are much too tight. Try stretching them by holding onto a squat rack and lowering your body until it is nearly parallel to the ground; hold this for 30 seconds. Go back up and repeat at least 5 times.
A great workout tip is to work the opposing muscle groups simultaneously to shorten your workout time. For example, work out your biceps for a set, and then work out your triceps for a set. The reason for this is because when you work out one muscle, the other muscle is resting. This decreases your resting time, which will decrease your total workout time.
You can use common household items as weights without having to go to the gym. Milk jugs make a fabulous weight for lifting. Hold a jug in each hand and do lunges down the hall. You can also lift it repeatedly over your head or from your side to straight out. You will slowly start to build up more strength over time.
Learn how to stretch your hip muscles. To properly perform squats, your hip muscles need to be loose. If they are not, you will not achieve proper form! Stretch these muscles by grabbing a sturdy towel bar and lowering your bottom almost to the ground several times. Make sure you do this slowly, or you may cause an injury.
If you alter the way you normally hold the weight bar while bench pressing, lower the amount you are pressing by ten percent. Just a simple grip change means you will be stressing different muscles and joints than you are typically used to, which could lead to injuries. The weight decrease will help prevent these injuries from occurring.
After your workout, if you are in pain, do not take ibuprofen, acetaminophen, or any other pain reliever. Research has shown that these pills do not help to relieve muscle soreness. In fact, researchers believe that taking any kind of pain reliever after a workout can actually suppress any kind of muscle growth.
When performing crunches, you should try and put your tongue on the roof of your mouth. A common problem people face when doing a lot of crunches is that their neck can get injured. Putting your tongue on the roof of your mouth can align your neck so that it won’t strain.
A great tip to improve quickness is to lift your left foot in front of you and touch it with your right hand and then lower it to the the floor. Then lift your right foot and touch with your left hand before lowering it to the floor. Do this as fast as you can for 20 seconds at a time for five sets.
Start walking every day. Not only does walking improve your cardiovascular health, help you lose or maintain weight and give you more energy, it adds years to your life. In addition, those years are of better quality because you are more mobile and more fit, making it easy to enjoy the things you love well into the future.
As stated in the beginning of this article, maintaining your physical fitness as you age is important to living a long healthy life. 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 healthy and strong.