How to stay fit and healthy at home

The year 2020 was, amongst other things, a revelation on how we spend money. The Reject Shop committed to saving every Australia n money on the essentials in life, and this includes staying fit and healthy. You can save a lot of money with your own health and fitness regime, without going to gyms, or spending money on personal trainers. Here’s how.

Different ways to help you stay fit and healthy at home

To become fit and healthy there are a few things you need to do, some ways to set yourself up to achieve success.

• Challenge yourself
  
  Simply going through the motions won’t cut it. Eventually, you’ll get bored of doing the same thing, and won’t feel motivated to train at all.
  If jogging is a part of your aerobic exercise, challenge yourself to jog a little further, or a little longer each day. Challenge yourself to beat your times each day or week.
  
• Find an Exercise partner
  
  Being accountable to someone else is a great motivational tool. You can make excuses for yourself some days but to someone else? Not so easy.
  These people can also run with you, work out with you and push you just that little bit further.
  
• Schedule your exercise time.
  
  Make it a part of your day, put it in your calendar so you don’t schedule meetings when you’re exercising. This is an important part of your life and should be treated as such.
  Also, if you’ve scheduled with your exercise partner you’re now obligated to someone else, and are less likely to make excuses to avoid exercise.
  
• Set goals and track them.
  
  Use a journal for this. Much like challenging yourself, set yourself a goal- to run a half marathon in 3 months; To lose 10 kilos in 10 weeks. When you know the end goal, you can break it down and work backwards to know where you should be, week by week.
  Then you journal this and be honest about your gains, your achievements, those moments of weakness when you didn’t run the entire distance.

Different ways to stay fit

There are two schools of fitness –

• Aerobic fitness
• Strength and Resistance

We always recommend warming up before any exercise and warming down once you’ve finished. This prepares your body and makes recovery so much easier.

Warming up

This gets your body moving, your heart rate up and gets you into the mood to exercise. Good warm-up exercises include:

• Arm circles and shoulder shrugs.
• Marching in place while swinging your arms.
• Forward leg swings and Sideways leg swings.
• Squats and lunges.
• Stretches, such as touching your toes, and back stretches.

Warming down

Just as important is warming down after you’ve exercised. This is so your muscles don’t suddenly stop exercising. They need to slow down to the workload you normally work at. Ways to cool down include:

• Light jogging or walking.
• Seated forward bend.
• Knee to chest pose while on the ground.
• Stretching, your legs and your arms and your chest. If you’ve been doing workouts which involve those muscle groups, stretching them out can help prevent cramps.

An excellent way to warm down as well is using the therapy roller ($10 30075635) to roll out lumps and sore spots in your legs and body. You use just your body weight to roll out your muscles. It is good, but it can hurt. Work through the pain for a great massage.

Aerobic Fitness at home

Photo by MIL-TECH PHARMA LTD on Unsplash

This is the workouts which get the heart pumping and making you out of breath. Running and jogging, riding a bike or playing sports, these are all aerobic exercise.

This type of workout increases your endurance capacity. You can go longer and further the better your aerobic fitness is.

While The Reject Shop does have things to help with your Aerobic Fitness, such as

• hacky sack
• skipping rope
• Hula Hoop

The best thing about aerobic fitness is, you really don’t need to spend a load of money on equipment.

Going for a walk, or a jog is the easiest way to begin your aerobic fitness journey. Please make sure you have good shoes before you start. We don’t want you jarring your knees or hurting your ankle because you had bad shoes.

Walk with a friend or walk your dog. Get some headphones and listen to a podcast or some tunes. You can make a tracklist, either a certain amount of time or a certain number of beats per minute to make sure you keep up your pace.

Just be aware of your surroundings when you’re running or walking with headphones on.

Strength and Resistance Training

You don’t need to be lifting weights to increase your strength and resistance. This type of exercise strengthens your body, protecting joints from injury, and making you more stable and more flexible. Good strong muscles support your body. The more muscle mass you have the more kilojoules your burn while at rest.

A tip- muscle weighs more than fat. Don’t be upset if you exercise a lot and put on weight. If it is muscle tone, this is a good weight.

We have some items in store which can help with your strength and resistance training.

• DumbBell 2kg
• iGym Hand Grips
• Fitness Ball

Photo by mr lee on Unsplash

Your own body weight is the perfect beginning to your strength and resistance training regime. Some beginning exercises can include:

• Squats – Do 20 squats, either all the way down or squatting onto a chair. Keep your back straight and push up with your legs, not your back. Squats are great for your glutes and your leg muscles.
• Push-Ups – start with 10 and work your way up in lots of 5 or ten. Good for shoulder and upper body strength.
• Walking Lunges – 10 for each leg to start with. Good for the driving muscle. And keeping your back straight, you’ll work your core as well.
• Plank- this works your core. Get on your toes and on your elbows, resting your forearms on the ground. Hold for 15 seconds to begin with, working your way up to longer times. This is a killer exercise for your core and abs.
• Sit-ups and bridges. Using the fitness ball, you can lay down on it, with your legs out supporting yourself. This helps with core strength. Move into some sit-ups while still balancing yourself on the ball for even more core strength training.

Don’t push yourself too hard

The idea that you must be healthy and fit right now, can be intimidating. We recommend starting slow. Work out with your partner a plan and build up gradually.

A short 2km walk today, next week get it up to 3km.

30 seconds on the plank? Get it up to 40 seconds next week.

You will notice improvements, and you will see results. It may be slow, to begin with, but those results will start to build. And you know what’s really cool? Once you start seeing improvement, it will spur you on to achieve more. When you see that all the work you’re putting in is making you faster and stronger, it encourages you to do more.

It doesn’t take much money to stay fit and healthy. And it is good for you physically, and mentally, to be active. Get up off the couch, get out the front door and breathe clean air. Get yourself walking further and feeling fitter.

Your health and fitness is not something you just do for a 12-week challenge and then compare yourself against others. It is something which needs to be considered for the long term. It is something you need to be doing, regularly, for your life. Figure out a way to be fit and healthy which fits you and your lifestyle. Enjoy getting fit and healthy.