5 Hot and Easy Fitness Tips to help you spring into summer.
Television personality, Personal Trainer and founder of the fitness program 28 by Sam, Sam Wood, shares his five hot fitness tips to help you spring into summer.
Spring is such a beautiful time of year and I love seeing more and more people outside exercising in the warmer weather. I also love that it becomes way more enjoyable to sip a smoothie and eat a salad. There’s no better time than right now to feel amazing.
Check out my five hot fitness tips to help you spring into summer:
1. Start now, make a schedule:
Too often people leave it to the last minute to get in shape for Summer. If you want to be feeling your best at the warmest time of year then you need to start making changes in Spring.
Starting in Spring gives you plenty of lead time to make the healthy, sustainable lifestyle changes that will be well-formed habits come Summer.
Start by creating a workout schedule, map out your meals and set short term, achievable goals to keep you motivated and accountable. I like to work in 28 day blocks as it’s short enough to not feel overwhelming but still long enough to see results.
2. Spring clean:
Spring is the perfect time to do an audit of more than just your pantry. Are you getting enough sleep? Managing stress? Drinking enough water? Getting enough steps in? There are so many more elements to weight loss than just your nutrition and workouts.
Spring is the perfect opportunity to take a step back and look at all the areas of your health where you could make improvements. Start by doing a big pantry clean out, removing all processed junk or temptations, and then stock up on all the healthy foods that will help take you closer to your goals.
From there, look at your sleep habits, stress management, water consumption and exercise routine and come up with small changes that will help to improve all of these factors. This might mean going to bed half an hour earlier, having 30 minutes of phone free time when you wake up or buying a 1 litre drink bottle to keep with you at all times. Small changes= big results!
3. Find something you love:
There is no point deciding to do spin classes every day if you know you hate spin. Find a workout that you enjoy, that gives you a good workout but most importantly that you will stick to. Starting in Spring gives you that little bit of wiggle room to try some new things until you find something that makes you want to get your sweat on.
4. Keep yourself accountable:
When you’ve got a bit more time up your sleeve this can sometimes mean slipping back into old habits or getting too comfortable. You should keep yourself accountable by tracking your progress to make sure you’re on schedule to meet your Summer goals.
This doesn’t mean you need to weigh yourself every week (in fact I would prefer you didn’t) but instead you could track your progress by keeping track of how many workouts you complete each week or how many of the 21 meals of your week are healthy choices.
Sometimes it might work better for you to be accountable to the process rather than the result to get you to where you need to be. Eg. Ticking off your workouts whenever you do them
5. Embrace the outdoors:
The warmer weather is the perfect time to get outdoors. It can be easy to stay sedentary when it’s chilly outside but you really want to try and be meeting your daily step count. You should be aiming for 10,000 steps per day but this doesn’t all need to be at once.
Try taking a lap of the block every hour, park a little bit further away from your destination and take the stairs wherever possible.
Every little bit counts! Instead of catching up with a friend over a drink, why not go for a walk instead? Your wallet and waistline will thank you for it.
