What is your fitness philosophy?
In other words: why do you train and
exercise? What is it that you hope to achieve by being physically active?
Many of us train because we want to look
better. Some of us train because we want to be healthier and stave off disease.
Others train because they want to perform better at a particular sport or
activity they enjoy.
But I have a different reason for training:
I train because I want to change the way I feel and because I want to change my
mindset. And this is also one of the driving factors behind my diet choices.
Tiredness
One of the biggest limiting factors in most
of our lives – one of the things that most prevents us from achieving all that
we want to achieve – is tiredness. You wake up in the morning and instead of
leaping out of bed filled with enthusiasm, you instead struggle to drag
yourself up and to actually start being productive. Then you get home and
instead of doing something fun, interesting or productive, you instead just
crash on the sofa and watch day time TV. Sound familiar?
Everything you do is less enjoyable when
you’re tired. All of your decisions are worse. All of your challenges are
harder. And I’m not talking about physical tiredness – I’m talking about mental tiredness. And that’s what you
can actually fix with the right training program and diet, unbeknownst to many.
How to Increase Brain Energy
So how can you increase energy in your
brain? One method is to increase the strength of your heart. If you do this,
then you’ll be able to pump more blood, oxygen and nutrients to your brain,
thus allowing it to perform more optimally. How do we do this? With steady state cardio This means the kind
of cardiovascular exercise that involves long durations of exercise. A good
example is running a few miles twice a week, which can help to enlarge the left
ventricle in your heart. This also reduces
stress by helping you to lower your resting heart rate and thus produce less
cortisol.
Also important is to increase the efficiency
of mitochondria. These are the parts of the cells that turn glucose into usable
energy and the more you have and better they function, the less tired you will
feel. You can increase these with a combination of HIIT training and
foods/supplements that are known to support them such as CoQ10, PQQ,
l-carnitine and others.
Here's the latest good news on your brain. Weight training that will improve your physical health, has also been shown to significantly improve your mental functioning. Latest research shows that early signs of dementia are reversed with just two days a week working on weight training at 80% of capacity. This is great news as a preventative option for seniors. I have blogged on this in detail at http://getfitnessathome.com/weightlifting-for-brain-health-in-your-home-gym/
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