Everyone thinks they know what the essentials are when it comes to fitness, but chiropractors have valuable insight that can help reshape your fitness game to help you get the most out of your workout.
Often in chiropractic care, patients are seen because they have sustained an injury that could have been avoided if an exercise regime had been established. Far too often we overlook the role that exercise plays in staying healthy and building a healthy lifestyle.
The truth is that exercise is important. How important? Exercise impacts the way your body functions on nearly every level. Exercise has been proven to improve your sleep, improve your mood, decrease depression, fight off illness, improve lifespan, and the list goes on.
Ultimately, if you are looking to improve your life start with exercise. Feeling motivated yet? You should be, creating a fitness routine will change your life for the better. Now that you’re ready to create some fitness goals, here are some chiropractor fitness tips so that you can get started on the right foot:
#1. Don’t Skip The Warm-Up
It can be really tempting to jump straight into your workout and skip your warm-up altogether, but this is a bad idea for a few reasons. First, you are less likely to listen to your body when it tells you something is wrong, this can lead to serious injury.
Second, stretching is something we often do during the warm-up that can help sustain you throughout the workout so that you get the most effective workout. If you want your workout to go well, and you want to avoid injury, it is essential to get a proper warm-up beforehand; stretching should be part of your warm-up.
#2. Ensure You Have Proper Technique
No matter what type of fitness plan you are working with, having a proper technique is critical. What is the proper technique? It refers to the way that an exercise is performed.
For example, when lifting weights it is important for your body to be aligned correctly so that the muscle groups that are intended to be targeted are engaged in the exercise. Having proper technique also makes sure that the joints used in the exercise are not overly stressed.
You may find that lifting weights with the technique you are using does not cause any pain in your joints, but over time this can change and cause serious injury.
Make sure you get the technique down early on so that injury can be avoided later. No matter what exercise you do (swimming, tennis, weight lifting, boxing, running, or golf) you should check with a coach or trainer to make sure that you have your technique down. Be sure to also follow up with your primary chiropractic care.
#3. Develop Good Daily Habits
How you use your body throughout the day, outside of your workout, impacts your body more than you realize.
Think of the chair you sit in, the height of your monitor, the shoes you run in, the bed you sleep on, these are all things that impact your body and ultimately will either fuel your workout or cause you to have a counterproductive workout.
It can be overwhelming to assess all the areas of your life where you can develop a good habit for your body, so start with one. Perhaps it is as simple as having a set of shoes for your workout that won’t hurt your feet. It could be adjusting your monitor height so that you are not slouched over your computer at work.
Maybe using your phone at eye level to prevent you from looking down as you respond to your texts. Choose something that feels reasonable and doable then build on it.
#4. Eat Well
The age-old adage, “You are what you eat” is simple and profoundly true: you really are the sum total of the things you eat.
The food you put into your body has an impact on every facet of your life including your fitness. Unfortunately, our culture has gone to two extremes when it comes to our eating habits. The first extreme is the overabundance of eating processed foods.
This is the cheap, fast food that when eaten regularly in huge portions can do a huge disservice to your body. The other extreme is the diet culture extreme, which comes in a lot of different forms but ultimately is designed to trick people into believing they can lose weight quickly and effortlessly if they follow a juice cleanse or a detox diet.
The diet culture extreme is sneaky.
It is aimed at health and wellness which is good, but ultimately most crash diets will do precisely that–crash. They are not sustainable and can leave people underfed and undernourished.
The best thing you can do is eat well and develop a balanced meal plan that you can sustain in the long run. If you need help knowing where to get started on your wellness journey talk to your chiropractor for a customized nutrition & supplementation plans that you can incorporate healthy eating into your daily diet.
Exercise is critical and essential to your wellbeing. No one knows more than chiropractors how essential it is to build an exercise regimen into your lifestyle because they have seen how a lack of proper fitness has injured their patients and how developing fitness has improved and healed lives.