Follow Some Bare Bones Fitness Advice

The Bare Bones Fitness Advice consists of following a few fundamentals of training for people whose life involves too much sitting—this is the majority of us. So this step focuses on walking, posture, and diet.

Walking, and Movement in General, is Key

Your first step should be to start a walking program. Three to five days a week, get up a little earlier than normal and go for a twenty to thirty minute walk in the morning.

Steps to successful walking:

• Develop a route that will take you 20 to 30 minutes.
• Walk quickly and smoothly.
• Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.

When you walk first thing in the morning, it will give you that get up and go self-discipline. Walking is extremely important! If you don’t walk in the morning, use your lunch hour. But morning walking is superior. And, yes, you can walk in the cold (and the rain)!

Double the Effectiveness of Your Walking

You can double the effectiveness of your walking by incorporating a breathing ladder. Here’s how it works: take one step and breathe in. On your next step breathe out. Then, breathe in for two steps and out for two steps. Keep increasing the number of steps that you inhale for and that you exhale for. In this way you will increase your lung capacity and learn to use your full lung.

Developing a walking program is critical to your overall anti-aging and health strategy. Not only is walking extremely enjoyable, it will keep your heart and lungs active and teach you how to use your full lungs, once you incorporate the breathing strategy.

Good Posture is Necessary to Age Successfully

The sit and slump (a.k.a. office work) is not good for your posture. Fixing your posture falls into two categories: avoiding bad posture and actively developing good posture.

Avoiding Bad Posture

While you’re at work, get up every 55 minutes and move around. Walk somewhere. Fill up your water. Getting up will help you avoid postural muscle fatigue. You’re not a Yogi capable of sitting with good posture for 10 hours at a crack. Getting up ensures you reset yourself. It also helps you approach your tasks with renewed vigor.

Make sure that for the 55 minutes you are sitting, you’re not slumping. Sit tall. The top of your monitor should be one inch lower then your eyes. Your chest shouldn’t be slumped. You should be breathing deeply!

Actively Developing Good Posture

At the office: When you get up every 55 minutes, you can occasionally include some stretches:

• Stretch your hamstrings.
• Perform a McKenzie Backbend.
• Twist left, hold for 10 seconds, then twist right and hold for 10 seconds while seated in your chair.

At home: Get a Swiss ball and do backbends on the Swiss ball. Do additional stretches for your hip flexors, such as those you’ll find on the stretching page. You should do these stretches 3-5 times per week.

Become aware of your posture and make sure you don’t sit for longer than 55 minutes. Do a couple stretches throughout the day at work and then follow that up with a few stretches at home. Between awareness and active measures, you will improve your posture!

Here are a few links to help with the stretches:

• These stretches open up your chest and prevent and correct rounded shoulders.
• Stretch your hamstrings and your hips flexors which shorten when you sit all day long.

Improve Your Food Selection Ability: How to Eat Well

The office is a great place to eat poorly. Your co-workers bring in donuts. You go out and get a huge lunch. You put sugar in your coffee or go to the soda and vending machines. And, you’re sedentary all day so already you need fewer calories.

• The first key: Eat in accordance to what you expend. See how little you actually need to eat. Don’t snack between meals. People gain weight because they exceed their feed limit.
• The second key: Limit the negative and accentuate the positive. Add vegetables to your meals as often as possible. Steam some broccoli or cauliflower. Spinach can easily be added to a lot of meals, like spaghetti, and it’s actually quite tasty.
• The third key: Don’t add sugar to your coffee! There’s enough sugar added to all the other food you eat anyway. Don’t drink soda, it’s just liquid calories that you don’t need. Eliminate liquid calories.

NOTE: One of the biggest culprits for weight gain is liquid calories. If you enjoy sugar in your coffee (especially flavored coffees), soda (even the diet kind), or alcohol, you’re unwittingly putting a lot of extra calories in your diet that you have to burn off. Cutting these out of your diet is a great starting point.

Following these three basic steps will put you on a totally different level of existence. If you can change your habits at will, control what you put in your mouth, and establish a basic program of movement and breathing, you’re well on your way to vastly improved health and a higher level of consciousness. Congratulations!