3 Tips For Long-Term Fitness

For how long do you want to be fit?
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Sounds like a silly question, right? Most would answer, “The rest of my life.”
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The tricky part about this question is that our personal definitions of fitness are bound to evolve as we age. Our activities change; our priorities shift; our needs differ.
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At one point we may consider ourselves fit if our Fran time is under X minutes. At another point, running a mile without stopping may be important to us. And at yet another juncture (well down the road), just making it up the stairs each day may be at the top of our list.
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So while fitness may have the concrete definition of work capacity across broad time and modal domains, the reality is that YOUR definition of fitness is the one that truly matters. Being able to dominate your life and respond to the events in your path each day is what truly matters.
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What does “Fit” mean to you? After you answer, ask yourself if what you responded with actually serves you. Or are you simply reciting what society has led us to believe is “fit”.
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After you’re in tune with what it is you truly value in terms of your health and fitness, here are 3 important tips to A. maximize your current fitness, and B. protect your future fitness (health):
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1. Move exceptionally well. It can never be overstated that moving in a technically sound, efficient manner is going to reduce stress on the body and help longevity. Quality over quantity. Mechanics, consistency, and then intensity. Form, form, form. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of wanting to go fast. Wanting to lift heavy. Wanting to beat someone else in a workout. There’s nothing wrong with those things, provided quality of movement is not sacrificed.
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2. Rest often. By working out and training, you are imposing a stressor on the body. The body’s ability to adapt to this stressor is what creates a result or outcome; i.e. bigger muscles, faster times, heavier lifts. So how do we adapt optimally to create the result? The answer is not more training, or more stress. The answer is…Recovery. Recovery in the form of sleep and nutrition balances out the training stimulus and helps create the adaptation. Get 8 hours of sleep. Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Watch your body adapt beautifully.
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3. Regulate intensity. Hopefully numbers 1 and 2 will take care of this one, but perhaps not. The idea is that we shouldn’t be going hard (redline) every single day. Let me go further: we shouldn’t be going hard 5 days a week! When we “max out” or redline often, our bodies are never able to fully recover and we end up spiraling into a mess of feeling like sh*t, not seeing the results we want to see, sleep and energy zapped, along with a myriad of other possibilities. We’re beating our bodies into the ground. Hormones tank and everything suffers. You can get away with this for a while, especially if you’re new to intense exercise. Take it from me and let me be an example because I’ve been there and done these things to myself. You can only leverage cortisol for so long. To the hard-drivers like myself, I ask, “Do you want to do this fun exercise thing for a few years or a few decades?” When the answer is the latter, we must adjust and create a responsible training plan to make it sustainable for the long-term.
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Define what “fitness” means to you. Use that definition and these tips to guide you in creating the best version of yourself – a version that is ever-evolving and growing as you need it to along your journey.
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Brickhouse is committed to creating a space where you can make this happen. For right now AND for many years to come. Email us today and find out how you can create the best version of yourself. Our free no-sweat intro provides the roadmap to get you there.

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