Listen, we understand: It can be really difficult to get your head — much less your body — up and out of bed in the morning. Sleep is difficult and sometimes even difficult sleep gets worse when you’re stressed by work or overscheduled with family activities or simply just stay up too late watching a movie. But you absolutely can and should rethink whether or not you want to continue avoiding working out in the morning, especially when you read about the benefits that it has.
Take food choices, for instance. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner selections you make throughout the day can be a whole lot healthier if you do that workout right away in the morning. You’ll also be much more alert and positive throughout your day and be able to handle the pressure of whatever life throws at you. Why else should you workout in the morning and how can you get started? This graphic explains it.
A good sleeping pattern delivers a lot of benefits. It helps to keep you looking and feeling young while protecting you from illness and disease. Sleep also improves your mood, making stress and anxiety easier to handle. However, many of us struggle to get our recommended 7-9 hours each night, check out this article from Sleep.Report about fixing your sleep schedule. If you’re one of the many people struggling with sleep right now, there could be a solution.
While you might assume that your phone should be the last thing you use before bed, sleep apps are becoming increasingly popular. These tools improve your sleeping patterns, boost relaxation and even encourage less stress. Let’s look at 7 of the best options.
The most important part of your workout comes after you leave the gym. Here’s everything you need to know about why it’s important to rest well after a workout.
The CDC recently reported that only 23% of Americans exercise regularly. Despite the undeniable health impacts of exercising, keeping fit for most people has only remained a new year’s goal that never actualizes. On the flip side, a significant number of those who work out hardly rest well.
Proper work out recovery is equally important as the workout. Yet, most fitness enthusiasts feel guilty when they have a day off the gym. You should take it easy on your body and rest well.
If you’ve been visiting the gym, you need to allocate the rest days. Keep reading to know why you need to rest well after working out.
Prevention of Muscle Injury
Workout stresses your body. Illustratively, weightlifting and other forms of weight exercises cause your muscles to have micro-tears. Without proper recovery, your tissues will swell and feel inflamed over time.
Rests reduce injury by preventing overuse. A day of rest can rejuvenate your muscles’ functionality. Pushing exercises too hard causes injuries.
Muscle injuries will necessitate you to have more rest days than you anticipate. It is essential to have planned rest days to deter muscle injury.
For Healthy Sleep
Regular exercise is one of the most recommended ways to improve sleep. Similarly, resting promotes healthy sleep. You need to know how to balance training and rest for a good night’s sleep.
Over-training keeps your body on high alert or restless. If your heart rate is unusually fast when resting, you’re probably over-training. You’ll notice that the alertness keeps you from falling asleep.
All forms of workout increase adrenaline and cortisol. These energy-boosting hormones are ideal when produced in moderation. With constant and vigorous training, the body overproduces hormones. Consequently, the quality of your sleep deteriorates. But when you rest well, hormone production can normalize. The balanced hormones will allow you to sleep soundly through the night.
Mental Health
Recent research showed that people who exercised at least three hours a week reduced the possibility of depression by 17% as compared to their inactive counterparts.
Several studies have confirmed the positive impacts of workout on mental health. Yet, there’s a notable gap in research relating to the mental effects of inadequate rest after workouts.
Physical burnout paves the way for mental fatigue. If you’re mentally tired, chances of performing dismally throughout the day are high. Besides, you might experience fluctuating moods.
Your mind needs to rest. Make mental adjustments and convince yourself that it’s essential to rest. While at it, sleep enough, hydrate, and have nutritious meals.
Rest Energizes Muscle Cells
Moderate and high-intensity exercises require a significant amount of energy. The workout depends on glycolysis energy, leading to the depletion of glycogen levels. Resultantly, one feels drained and sluggish.
Having considerably low glycogen levels can have adverse effects on your system. The body might start using protein for energy instead of muscle repair. The confusion in body functionalities affects your overall well-being.
You can’t ignore the importance of rest day in energy replacement. If you’ve been feeling sluggish, rest might be the best solution. Ensure that you take enough rest before embarking on the next weightlifting session.
Performance Improvement
Athlete workout and any strenuous form of physical exercises leave you fatigued. If you don’t rest well after the workout, your typical routine becomes impossible. In fact, you might be unable to continue your training regimen with the initial vigor.
Sufficient rest ensures that you remain active throughout the day. It is essential to know about the key elements of effective post-workout recovery. The information will guide you on what to do on rest days.
Resting will prevent fatigue and increase your energy levels. Besides, you’ll have more successful workouts. Moderate workout and adequate rest will give you more fulfilling results than endless days in the gym.
Impacts on the Immune System
Physical exercise has been one of the highly recommended alternatives to medicine. It reduces the risk of several diseases, such as diabetes and cancer.
Excessive exercise can stress the immune system. The result is increased susceptibility to infections. While the research on the topic has been debatable, cases of increased upper respiratory tract infections have been notable among endurance athletes.
It is crucial to understand your tolerance levels. Regardless of your high fitness goals, you ought to know when to stop. Fitness should not override your immunity.
The cumulative training impedes immunity. For that reason, adequate rest is essential. When you rest well, you can resume your vigorous exercise.
Work Balance
If you fail to rest well, your output in your business or office won’t be desirable. The fatigue can make you spend a whole day on your desk in futility. Exercise shouldn’t lower your productivity.
Not unless you work in a fitness center, the time you spend working out shouldn’t outdo your time at work. Excessive workout and reduced recovery time will affect your resourcefulness in the workplace. Finding a balance is more fulfilling and it will help in your physical and financial growth.
Improve Your Social Life
Working out without resting makes you too fatigued to socialize. On your rest days, you can spend time with your family. Engage in other activities such as baking.
You can use your rest days to watch sports or volunteer in community work. The experience will improve your socialization and make you look forward to resting days.
Conversely, daily fatigue can reduce intentional interaction even with your family members. The mental fatigue leads to mood swings. You might feel the need to stay enclosed in your room.
It Is Vital To Rest Well For Your Workout Program to Be Effective
The positive impacts of regular exercises are unbeatable. But when you don’t rest well, you might not gain from the workouts. Instead, you will deal with a variety of physical, mental, and social implications.
Resting well encompasses several things. It would be best if you got enough sleep, eat a balanced diet, and hydrate. By the time you resume exercise, you will be in a better physical and mental state.
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Regardless of the time of day, stretching is a well-known method to relieve tension along your back, neck, shoulders and other pressure points throughout the body. It also has the capability to reduce stress levels and promote relaxation, which is key if you want to fall asleep quickly and actually remain asleep. That’s why incorporating gentle stretches into your regular nighttime routine has proven to be advantageous for your quality of sleep. In fact, one compilation study review that combined American and Chinese research shows that meditative movements can improve sleep quality and have a positive impact on a person’s physical and mental health.
Stretching also allows you to practice mindfulness as you focus on your body movements and breathing. This teaches you how to be more in control of your mind, and can help you cope more effectively when anxious thoughts creep into your brain before bedtime. Considering about 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety or anxiety disorders, stretching before bed can be a helpful way for a lot of people to catch up on their Zzzz’s.
Here are a few of the best stretches you can do at nighttime to help you relax and unwind before you tuck yourself into bed.
Before-Bed Bridge
This pose is often used in pilates and yoga as it’s great at strengthening the core, and opening up your chest and hip flexors. It also has an array of other health benefits, as doing the bridge before bed can help evoke feelings of relaxation, improve digestion, and alleviate lower back pain.
If you don’t find this pose helpful for easing your lower back pain, the culprit could possibly be your bed, and it may be an indication that it’s time for an upgrade. The best mattress for side sleepers with lower back pain and others who suffer from the issue is one that contains coils because they tend to be much more supportive than all-foam beds, and will help keep your spine in proper alignment.
Low Lunge
This is an optimal stretch if you want to target your hip flexors, glutes, thighs, and groin. You can also open your chest while you’re holding this position for tension relief in your back and shoulders. Just make sure you remain comfortable when doing this pose and don’t strain yourself, or else you might end up feeling stimulated and awake — the exact opposite effects of what you’re going for.
Legs-Up-The-Wall Pose
The legs-up-the-wall stretch is a restorative pose which means it’s essentially a resting pose, and one of its main purposes is to promote relaxation. This specific restorative stretch also eases tension in your neck, shoulders, and back while it targets your glutes and hamstrings.
Child’s Pose
It’d be remiss not to mention child’s pose, another restorative pose that’s extremely popular because it’s a meditative movement that encourages you to meditate as you hone in on the rhythm of your breath. This relaxes your mind, body, and can be a big stress reliever after a long day on the job or watching the kids. Child’s pose also helps reduce tension in your neck, back, and shoulders.
Lying Spinal Twist
The spinal twist is an ideal stretch for individuals who spend a large portion of their day sitting in an office chair. After about eight hours of sitting down hunched over a computer keyboard, this movement stretches out and realigns the spine, and helps improve one’s posture.
Corpse Pose
Finishing off your pre-bedtime stretching session with the corpse pose is an effective way to get a head start on your sleep. Believe it or not, there’s a yoga stretch called the corpse pose where all you do is lay still on the ground (hence the name). It’s the ultimate restorative pose where you’re only expected to focus on your breathing, and is one of the best poses to do before bed to induce sleepiness.
About The Author
McKenzie Dillon is a blogger and sleep enthusiast for The Slumber Yard, a reviews site that focuses on bedding products. In her free time, she likes attending music festivals, reading fiction novels and practicing yoga.
Everyone knows that sports activities are great for building character and learning how to work with a team, whether it’s in little league or in a competitive college environment. Most high school and college athletes know that it’s important to make sure that they fuel up for the day ahead. However, with the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it’s easy to overlook all the things that can ensure good health and wellness before hitting the field or the court. This is especially true for athletes who are going through a big transition—such as high school players who are heading off to college.
Learning to manage a whole new independent lifestyle while keeping up with practice and studying is a huge learning curve. College athletes have to juggle a lot of different responsibilities while keeping their diet, health, and routine in check. So how can they do it? Here are 6 ways young athletes can stay healthy and in top condition during their years in college.
We all know bad health habits when we experience them. Smoking, for instance, you know it’s a no-no. Habits such as drinking until you lose your consciousness, eating junk food, sleeping less than 6 hours a day and sitting all day without even a minute of exercise are bad for your health. We also know good healthy habits when we see or experience them; drinking at least eight glasses of water every day, walking 10,000 steps every day, eating more fruits and vegetables than other foods and resting.
The question is, how often do you remember these healthy habits? Are you sometimes too tired to drink enough water every day? Below are healthy habits you certainly know but often you forget.
We’ve heard many times that technology is bad for our sleep. We definitely agree that this is sometimes the case. For example, using your laptop or smartphone right before bedtime can affect the quality of sleep because of the blue light emitted by these devices.
Sadly, research shows thataround 95% of people use technology within an hour before bed.
However, technology can also help us improve both the quantity and the quality of our sleep. Scientists around the world work tirelessly night and day to develop intelligent technological solutions that can combat common sleep disorders.
Here is a list of the most incredible ones we have found. If you suffer from any of these sleep problems, make sure to test the solutions.
Please include attribution to disturbmenot.co with this graphic.
It depends! That is one of the most common answers in the health, wellness and fitness industries. Why? Every single person is unique and reacts differently to various stimuli. That is why there is not a universal training program that works for everyone. That is why there is not a certain diet that works for everyone. In this situation, it really depends first and foremost on whether you’re having trouble sleeping or not. There are countless sleep-based research studies that have been conducted. Private companies trying to promote their revolutionary, or not so revolutionary, products often conduct their own studies. Universities and wellness institutes do the same since sleep is often considered the most crucial way to recover, and recovery is seen as one of the three core competencies when it comes to your general health. (The other two are physical activity and what you consume.)
In college, I operated at an extremely high level while sleeping four hours or so a night. At the time, I did take a mid-day nap for about an hour. I was training nearly six hours a day and consuming well over 12,000 calories a day. While I was completely drug free, I would take a multi-vitamin everyday and also took some supplements, including fish oils, glucosamine and even melatonin. Melatonin is the most common sleep aid on the market. It is made by many companies and its single ingredient nature makes it less intimidating to most consumers. First, will melatonin make a difference in your sleep and second, how much do you personally need to take?
Even after you find the right amount, any supplement to your health routine might not necessarily maintain its effectiveness over time. You can often build tolerances and find that you need a higher dosage to feel the same outcome. Even if you find it to make a positive difference, the cost over time might outweigh how much better you’re sleeping. It becomes a question of whether you’re willing to make a small investment at first, in order to see if you can sleep better. Those investments can come in many forms, other than pills or tablets. I’ve tried buying expensive pillows, fancy sheets, using a fan at night to stay cool, sleeping with ice packs under my lower back and shoulders, playing sleep music throughout the room, using blackout curtains and more. I’ve tried Neuro’s sleep drink and also Ronnie Coleman’s Resurrection supplement. Why? Because I understand the importance of optimizing recovery.
Most people aim for 6-8 hours of sleep a night. Those are the recommended numbers, according to most sleep research studies. I don’t care as much about the number of hours that I lay in bed at night. My focus is getting in bed, immediately falling asleep, not waking up in the middle of the night and waking up fresh enough that I can instantly roll out of bed at 5:30 in the morning and get right to work. My goal, with my current life schedule, is to be in bed from 10:30 pm-5:30 am and do nothing other than get quality recovery time. Right now, in an effort to do so, with the blistering temperatures and lack of air conditioning in our LA apartment, as well as my insanely, unimaginably impossible schedule, I’ve started using a new product called Sleep Complex by ORB. They reached out to us to see if we would like to try out their product. For honesty purposes, we were paid for this post, but that won’t stop us from giving our honest opinion.
I was scrolling through my Instagram feed the other day when I saw Jesse Itzler (entrepreneur and author of one of my favorite books, Living With a Seal) encourage his followers to look at their spending habits differently. A lot of people see the amount that they spend on the gym, supplements, organic produce, free-range meat and quickly reconsider their positive lifestyle changes. They tell themselves that all these things don’t matter as they make up excuses to justify their lack of progress. Whether it is bad genetics, an old injury or they can’t afford it, people are constantly creating barriers for themselves. Still, like in business, you need to invest to see some serious returns!
Having a healthy and good lifestyle is not just about eating good food and treating yourself to holidays in Hawaii. There is a lot more you can do to make sure your 2018 lifestyle is healthy.
Have a positive mindset about working out
It is so easy to begin going to the gym today and to quit after a week or two. With constant mental roadblocks about working out, it is quite easy to develop negative energy towards it. The trick is to shift your mindset about working out and think of it as a need instead of a want. It is easy to manipulate your body through how you think because the two are linked. Be realistic about your workout goals and stick to them in order to achieve t
Treat yourself to the chiropractor!
hem in the long run. Study your body, and find out how to satisfy its needs in terms of health and fitness, for instance, if you have back problems which may affect your workout routines, get access of the Richmond chiropractic services. Also, go for regular body checkups to ensure you are in good shape.
