Every year around this time, most of us feel intense pressure to get back on our workout grind. Renewing our gym pass is probably on most of our new year’s resolutions lists. As a holistic and sustainable agency, we believe sustaining your physical activity is necessary year-round for your health and happiness. Fitness culture can sometimes accompany toxic positivity and unwanted body goal pressures; however, it’s important to note that regularly participating in fitness activities can positively impact your mental health. Let’s talk about the importance of sustaining fitness!
Let’s talk about fitness in regard to health, new fitness norms, and why it’s important to sustain physical activity.
Health > Body
How does regular exercise affect your mental health?
From a scientific standpoint, your body releases endorphins and serotonin that improve your mood when you work out. Regular exercise also improves blood flow to the brain, helping you think clearer and increasing the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory. From a feeling standpoint, fitness can reduce stress and anxiety and improve your sleeping habits. If we want to get specific, working out in the morning has exclusive benefits, including boosts of energy and improved focus and cognition.
How do I sustain my fitness attendance?
Getting ourselves in the gym may already be challenging, but sustaining gym attendance is another thing. There are a few things we can do to stay in the gym, including;
- Have reachable goals for yourself; create short-term easy-to-achieve goals and long-term goals.
- Reward yourself; make a healthy reward system for yourself that will motivate you to work out. One fun way to reward yourself is using a red light face mask or sauna blanket from HigherDose.
- Make it fun; making a game out of my physical fitness keeps me active. Adding different sports or taking a new class keeps you on your toes.
- Diversify your workout; for the days when you know you can’t make it to the gym or you begin to feel bored with your regular gym routine, add an at-home workout program like Flexit Fitness into the mix.
- Have a routine; for all my routine-oriented people, we know sticking to our daily habits helps us in many ways. If you add your workout to your daily routine, you’re bound to complete it!
Flexit Fitness’s mission is to enable its users to visit gyms across the country using their phones and only pay for the time they spend working out. No tour, no paperwork, no need to wait on the phone, no need to speak to anyone on the way in. With Connected Training™, FlexItPRO™, FlexItNOW, and FlexIt Nutrition, they constantly innovate new ways to improve our clients’ well-being.
HigherDOSE is all about plugging back into the healing power of nature and prioritizing feeling our best from the inside out. They believe health is the ultimate luxury and wellness is an investment that continues to grow over time. Their passion is for designing the most effective self-care tools for boosting longevity and vitality and educating our community about their powerful benefits.
“Body Goals”
One of the most talked about toxic factors of the gym is the “body goals” and body image trends that cause negative impacts between individuals and fitness. Thankfully, cultural movements are creating new spaces focusing on normalizing and accepting natural bodies, groups like body positivity and body neutrality movements. More conversation has been had to improve fitness culture, and more gyms have implemented new strategies to support these groups. Check out our next blog for more on this topic!
Sean Casey
My name is Sean Casey. I’m a fitness enthusiast and Exos Sports Certified trainer! Fitness saved my life, and I love to pay it forward. I’ve been training for over ten years and have worked with all types of individuals, from senior pre-diabetics to NFL athletes. Everyone has what works for them, and as a trainer, it’s my job to figure that out. There is no one-size-fits-all in fitness.
What is your take on mental health in connection to physical health? Do you believe too much focus on the physical can hinder mental health?
You can’t have good mental health without physical health. Mental health is known to improve based on your physical health, but too much of anything is usually bad for you, so if you put too much emphasis on the physical, it can negatively affect your mental health.
During the holidays, people often feel pressure to look their best and get back into the gym. Have you seen this holiday fitness toxicity? What is your professional take on holidays and fitness?
Based on my experience, I feel many people neglect the gym during the holidays and ‘start fresh in the new year.’ Obviously, it’s a lot harder to make time during the holidays, but it’s a necessary part of life, so you should schedule your workout! You can always make them shorter in duration to save some time.
How can we stay motivated to exercise year-round? How can we begin to rid ourselves of fitness toxicity?
Most of my clients consistently try to do their workouts as much as they can during the holidays, but when they can’t, they don’t push it. You begin to understand how necessary fitness is to your mental and physical health when you train year-round. It’s almost impossible to be motivated all the time, but if you understand it’s something you NEED to do, you do it whether you feel like it or not, like brushing your teeth. I think it’s essential to start building the client’s mindset (if they don’t already have it) that it’s about the process and there is a way to do this. For some, it works quicker than others, but you get what you give at the end of the day! It’s about the quality and consistency of the work.
We want to thank Sean Casey for his insight! Check out his Instagram and Raw Fit Labs to learn more about booking with him.
What did you learn from this blog? Will you be taking your fitness more seriously? Let us know in the comments or by DMing us on our Instagram.
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