We all want to be healthier. Half the time though it seems too hard. It’s too hard to go to the gym. It’s too hard to eat healthy. It’s much easier being ‘bad’ than ‘good’, when it comes to diet choices. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are simple, easy ways to live a healthier life, and we fortunately have got a lot of experience with helping clients make small but significant changes, and over time they add up to make some dramatic changes.  

To start with, focus on getting the low hanging fruit of sleep, and then going from there. To make change sustainable, it has to be easy. It begins with sleep, then once you’re getting adequate amounts of it, adding better buying choices to your kitchen, to building and developing a more positive support network that encourages healthy lifestyle choices such as walking groups, clubs, weekend swimming groups, then starting introduce gym training as part of it. This can obviously be dramatically improved with the guidance of a qualified coach. 

Sleep – The Low Hanging Fruit. 

How often have you ever been so tired, that you got sick? Or had a micro sleep on the train? Do you get to 10am in the morning and if you lay down on a soft bed, would you fall asleep? If the answer is yes to those, then you’ve probably at a point in your life had some form of sleep deprivation. In fact in the modern world, sleep or lack thereof is a western epidemic. The screens we look at day in day out, the late nights, will be slowly affecting our memory, our moods, our relationships, our body composition, our overall health. 

We are huge advocates of getting a good night’s rest each night.  As sleep is our natural healthcare provider. It is an intensely metabolic process which lowers inflammation, stimulates healing, produces a much more stable hormone balance that improves mood, concentration and performance. With adequate sleep, we can become better human beings.

Here are a few tips that we advocate: 

  • Take a hot bath or shower before bed. This will help bring our blood flow to your extremities and help us lower your body temperature which is optimal for deep sleep. 
  • Eat a light meal rather than a large one. 
  • Eliminate or limit alcohol intake prior to bed. 
  • Stop using all screened devices (smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions) 1-2 hours before bed time. 
  • Wake up at the same time every day, regardless of the day of the week. 
  • Give yourself an eight and a half hours sleep ‘opportunity’. If you need to be up at 6am, be in bed for 9.30pm. If that isn’t possible, just increase the amount of time you spend in bed. 
  • Read a book or newspaper before bed. 
  • If you wake up during the night and can’t sleep, get up, and do something in a separate room until you feel sleepy again. 
  • Black out your bedroom. Remove all artificial lights and use black out blinds. 
  • Open a window. A cool bedroom is much better for deep sleep. 

For more information go to this link on our website here. 

People Who Are Surrounded By Healthy Supportive Communities Live Longer. 

In Sardinia, they have the highest density of 100 year olds than anywhere else in the world. The reason: social integration. When people are fully and wholly integrated into the community, feeling part of a trusted network of friends and family, our bodies thrive. It fights off infection, cancer, and viruses. The key driver behind this is down to a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is fundamental to the feeling of trust we have between close knit communities. It’s a hormone that is released when we feel safe, and looked after. Environments that do this, can help boost those who spend time there, and help as a result prevent disease. 

Spend time with those who enjoy your company, those who you can trust and feel open towards. Our community at our gym is what we aim to create. A feeling of good people, encouraging each other to do better, and make better choices. It’s really quite powerful.

If you’re interested for more watch “Susan Pinker: The secret to living longer may be your social life”, it’s fascinating. 

If it’s in the House, It Will Be Eaten…Eventually. 

To make better choices, takes planning. The first part of the process is to buy more healthy food and less unhealthy food. If you can begin to fill your fridge with good quality vegetables, fresh fruit, and empty out the biscuits, snacks, crisps and ‘treats’ from your larder, you’ll be far more likely to make better choices, because in a sense you’ve already made one by getting rid of the unhealthy options. 

Making it easy to prepare healthy breakfasts by having the right utensils, good quality non-stick pans, easy to clean blenders, decent refrigerator and freezer, will make life a lot easier. Having plenty of tupperware to take healthy food with you when you’re on the road, or busy at work, can have enormous impacts of the kinds of choices you make on a daily basis. These 1% gains, begin to accumulate and make the life you once lived a thing of the past, and healthier future awaits you. 

The key to living a healthy life: Fitness. 

Without being fit, functional movements i.e daily activities such as carrying shopping, lifting boxes, walking into town, cycling on the weekend, become hard, physical and unpleasant activities. With a greater level of fitness, comes a greater opportunity to experience the best that life has to give. Train for health, and you’ll also get more life too. 

Our program is designed to give you all facets of movement, giving you a broad fitness, allowing you to be confident in your bodies’ ability to accomplish nearly any task you give it, and that, ultimately, is what fitness is for. We want to be skiing when we’re 90. We want to play with our grandchildren, we want to be independent, able to perform basic activities such as getting up off the toilet without a handrail, or run for the bus if we have to. All of these things are basic human rights, that we lose if we fail to take care of our bodies in later life. ]

See www.crossfitchichester.com for how we could help you achieve this.