Healthy Eating for Training
As discussed in part one, the balance between diet and exercise is absolutely essential to a healthy lifestyle! Consuming a variety of nutrients before and after a workout greatly impacts the quality of your session and affects your fitness goals. Listed below are some benefits of healthy eating on exercise performance!
Benefits of a Healthy Diet to Exercise Ratio
1. Water - Replaces water that’s lost during exercise, prevents overheating, and helps carry oxygen to the heart and muscles that you’re working out.
2. Protein - Allows for growth and repair of muscles.
3. Vitamins and Minerals - Provides for added energy and muscle contraction.
4. Carbs - Supply your body with energy.
Exercise:
You can eat all of the healthy foods you want, but without some sort of physical activity, you’re only reaching half of your body’s potential for optimal health! The three basic components of exercising type, duration, and frequency. You’ll want to make sure that you’re applying each of these based on your individual needs (ie: overall wellness, weight loss, etc) and ability (beginner, expert, etc.)
Working It Out
Generally speaking, of any kind should be performed about 3-5 times a week. The modifications of each begin with the kind of activity you’ll be doing and for how long. Here are some great exercises that help improve cardiovascular and mental health, weight management, muscle strength, and MORE:
- Martial Arts - 45 minutes -1 hour
- Walking - 30 minutes
- Running - 20-30 minutes
- Swimming - 20-30 minutes
- Strength Training - 20-40 minutes
Don’t Forget to Rest
Aside from getting those 8 hours of sleep each night, bursts of rest during an exercise and devoting full days to rest without any exercise at all, are extremely important to allow your body to heal between rigorous activity! There are several advantages of incorporating these breaks, such as allowing your body time to heal damaged tissue, refuel energy supply, and even injury prevention. Rests also come in different forms like: instead of taking your usual run, you walk that day, or on your typical strength training day, you do yoga instead. you decided to take a break is totally up to you as long as you make sure that you’re giving your body the proper break it needs!
You Can Do It!
Everyone will have a different diet to exercise ratio that works for them, but applying some of the universal suggestions above can assist in helping you achieve and then preserve your individual objective. All of these can be tweaked to fit into your specific lifestyle, but one concept that will never is that no matter what kind of exercise you choose, once it’s integrated with a healthy diet, you will be unstoppable!
Resources:
http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/nutrition-affect-exercise-6391.html
