1. Create your own personal fitness area

It doesn’t have to cost you thousands of dollars to set up a fitness area at home. You may not necessarily need or want any fancy equipment. You just need to set up a specific place in your home where you go to exercise. Make sure it’s an open space so you’ll have room to move around. Start simple! Purchase a floor mat, get some adjustable dumbbells or resistance bands. You can add to your equipment as you get fitter.

If you have a TV in your bedroom or in another area of the house, move it to your new gym and exercise while you watch your favourite shows. Or get some mini speakers for your iPod and listen to the songs that remind you of fun times in your life.

2. Go to bed

It might seem obvious, but skipping out on that hour or two of sleep can really affect your productivity and take a toll on your energy levels. Getting seven to eight hours of sleep every night is important for your mind and your body. Do what you can to wind down for the couple of hours before you go to sleep each night.

While exercising is important, you’ll want to avoid working out just before bedtime as well, so you don’t confuse your body into thinking it’s time to be full of energy – when really it’s time to shut down.

3. Calm Down

Stress is a normal part of life, but finding time to de-stress should be part of your everyday health routine.

Exercise will help. Even a short walk, is a good way to clear your mind.

Meditation can be a great way to de-stress. Many people enjoy Yoga for its meditative benefits – but even finding a quiet place and just closing your eyes can be a refresher.

Read a good book, take a soothing bath, or listen to music. Talk with a good friend and get a few good laughs in. When the work day is done, stop thinking about everything that you’ll need to do for the next day and simply relax.

4. Stretch

Stretching is a quick and easy way to reduce tension and build injury-proof your muscles. At the end of each day, sit on the lounge room floor for a few minutes and stretch out your muscles.

5. Keep a Fitness Journal Write down your fitness goals in a journal, diary or online tracking app. Set a list of reasonable goals to start. Record the exercises you do. Even writing down how you feel after exercising can reveal new things that will help you tailor your individual fitness plan.

6. Phone a friend

Support is crucial. Find a workout buddy who is supportive and has similar fitness goals to you. Work out with a friend, child or partner. Encourage each other to stay motivated. It might be as simple as walking around the neighbourhood or grabbing a friend for a short walk during your workday.

The key to lifelong fitness is the daily habits you develop so use these suggestions to build a routine that will make you fitter and healthier in 2012.

Apparently it is a primary goal in 2012 for three out of four consumers, even though it is yet to translate into daily routines.

He goes on to state that “It’s not an exaggeration to say that health is the new prestige barometer in this country ˜ meaning that the great majority of Americans would rather be considered healthy rather than wealthy.”

My guess is that, if asked, you would say the same thing; you would put health over wealth (not that you can’t have both).

If that’s the case, what are you going to do in 2012 to ensure better health and fitness this year. Here’s some things you could do to be fitter and healthier this time next year.

• Get up 30 minutes earlier to go for a walk, run, swim or bike ride. If breakfast is supposed to kick-start your metabolism after a night’s sleep imagine what some exercise will do to it.

• Get up from your desk twice every hour to bend, stretch, walk around your office or run up to the next floor and back. There is increasing evidence that people who sit for 8 hours a day at work are at increased risk, so plan to move often.

• Find a friend (or a dog) who needs to improve their fitness and make a deal to meet them to exercise a couple of times a week. Having a commitment to someone else is the best way to maintain your routine.

• Plan a holiday or trip that motivates you to train and get fitter. The power of a goal to get you out of bed when it is cold outside can’t be overstated. Knowing you will enjoy your holiday so much more if you are fit is a good incentive to push that bit harder.

• Imagine how bad you will feel if your fitness and health are worse in 12 months than they are now. And use that feeling to motivate you to get going when you’d rather not. The fear of losing something, in this case your health and fitness, is a strong motivator. Use it to your advantage.

Use them to assess your current fitness program and make changes if necessary.

Aerobic training

5 days a week of moderate-intensity exercise, 30-60 minutes a day, at least 150 minutes a week, or 3 days a week of vigorous-intensity exercise, 20-60 minutes a day, at least 75 minutes a week.

Resistance training

2-3 days a week, 48 hours between sessions, 2-4 sets per exercise, 8-12 reps per set (10-15 for older adults just starting exercise), 2-3 minutes of rest between sets.

Flexibility training (stretching)

2-3 days a week, hold each stretch for 10-30 seconds, repeat each stretch 2-4 times.

Functional fitness (Pilates, 
tai chi, yoga) 2-3 days a week, 20-30 minutes a day.

If you can maintain an acitvity schedule that achieves these recomendations you will be well on your way to a fitter and healthier year in 2012.

Good luck.

Even if you have established a regular exercise routine, now is a good time to review it to see if you can make it more effective or get better value form your time and effort.

Here is some guidelines to help you design your fintess routine for 2012.

Lift weights

Strength training is critical for all adults to help prevent age-related bone and muscle loss, both of which can lead to falls, injuries and excess body fat.

If time is limited, shorten your aerobic activity to make time for weightlifting, suggests the chairwoman of the ACSM committee that wrote the new recommendations.

Remember, your body is a weight so just doing bodyweight strength exercises is enough for maintaining strength and preventing muscle loss.

Don’t be a weekend warrior

Research suggests that it’s less effective for adults with cardiovascular risk factors to do most of their physical activity on Saturday or Sunday. Instead, do shorter bouts of exercise throughout the week.

Your body adapts to exercise in the day or two after you have pushed it outside it’s comfort zone. If you only exercise on the weekends, the gains will be lost before you get back to doing some more exercise. Exercising during the week also makes you sharper at work.

Do a variety of exercise

The ACSM recommends “functional fitness” activities such as Pilates, tai chi and yoga. These combine balance, stretching and muscle strengthening, and they can improve your agility and body control.

I also recommend that you train like a triathlete and include some swimming, cycling and running (or walking) into your routine. That way you can do something every day but give muscles a rest every other day.

Don’t be sedentary during your downtime

Aim never to go for an hour without moving. Get up from your desk at work every time the phone rings or at least every hour. If you drive a vehicle, take regular breaks to walk around jump up and down a few times. The ACSM suggest finding six or seven more hours a week to spend on your feet, to move around more throughout the day and cut your evening screen time.

Stretch after working out, not before

To obtain maximum benefit from flexibility training, your muscles need to be warm. There is no evidence that stretching before exercise prevents injury so take more time to warm up and save your stretching for after you have finished. USe your stretching time to relax and get your body temperature and heart rate back down.

Don’t rely solely on step counts, time or distance

While pedometers can be effective for promoting activity, step counts, time and distance aren’t an accurate measure of exercise intensity or quality. You are better to use a heart-rate monitor to track intensity. Aim for a set number of minutes or bursts at a higher intensity or heart rate, rather than a certain number of steps.

Watch your eating

Exercise alone can cut your body fat and alter your body’s composition, but it has minimal impact on actual weight loss over the short term. While fitness is more important than fatness, losing weight if you’re overweight can enhance the health benefits of exercise and watching your food intake is essential to manage your weight.

Don’t get discouraged if you’re not that fit

Even a little exercise is better than nothing. The greatest impact on health comes from going from sedentary to some activity, so just getting moving is a great first start.

The hardest part of exercise is getting started and most people fail at the beginning before they see significant improvements in their fitness.

Slowly build up your duration, then focus on increasing the intensity.

Do you know someone who does?

While there is little doubt that some people tend to store fat more better than others and some people just never seem to put on weight, having a so-called obesity genedoesn’t necessarily doom you to being fat.

Provided you stay active.

A meta-analysis (where they study studies) that included 45 studies of 218,166 adults looked at the effect physical activity had on inheriting a gene associated with fat mass and obesity, also known as the FTO gene or obesity gene.

Researchers found that having the gene increased the risk of being overweight or obese. It also increases your chance of having a higher body mass index, a larger waist circumference and higher body fat percentage.

However, getting some exercise reduces that chance.

Being physically active had an effect on the FTO gene, reducing obesity risk by an average of 27% compared with people who were sedentary.

In reviewing the studies, researchers set the bar fairly low for what they considered physical activity. People were deemed inactive if they had a sedentary job and did less than one hour of moderate to vigorous activity per week, or their level of physical activity was in the lowest 20% among the participants in the study.

The researchers conclude that physical activity is a particularly effective way of controlling body weight in individuals with a genetic predisposition towards obesity. This goes against the belief that genetics determine the outcome. They might make it harder for you, but don’t destine you to carry extra body fat and weight for life.

The findings mean you you have much more control over determining your health, fitness and body fat levels.

So if you have been blaming your parents, get moving and get control.

This isn’t good for your fitness or health.

There is increasing evidence that if you spend up to 8 hours a day in a sedentary job you are at increased risk of poor health regardless of whether you exercise regularly. So anything you can do to break up the sedentariness(?) of your day will help to reduce the risk.

Not only that but movement during the work day improves your performance so you’ll be more effective and efficient so you’ll get more done in the time you are stuck at the desk.

Here are some suggestions to add a little bit of movement to your day.

1. Stand up and move around the office

Any opportunity to get up will increase blood flow around the muscles. Rather than take phone calls sitting down, stand up every time the phone rings and if possible have conversations on your feet. If you don’t get many calls, set your smart phone to alert you every 45 minutes to move.

Stretch. Bend. Swing your arms around.

Take five deep breaths, and get your blood circulating throughout your body. Do this for five minutes a day, five times a day.

This is not a workout, but it will decrease stress while improving your circulation. you’ll feel better and be more focused each time you sit back down.

2. Use a Fit Ball

Sitting on comfortable office chairs at desks with arms aimed at a keyboard for hours is a recipe for poor posture and weak core muscles. This can impact your posture for the rest of your life.

Swap the chair for a Fit Ball. It promotes good posture, and you will be activating your core at the same time.

You don’t have to do this all day. In fact it is advisable to alternate between a normal chair and Swiss ball during the day. Sitting on a Swiss Ball for 15 minutes, four times per day is a realistic target.

3. Find some stairs

Stairs are the perfect way to get your lungs puffing and blood flowing. Two to four flights of stairs will only take 30 seconds to a minute and so you won’t get so hot that you have to change out of your work clothes.

If you are looking to use your lunch break as effectively as possible, you can make a quick change and use the stairs for interval training. Go up for one minute than down as slowly as it takes to get your breath back. Do that five to 10 times and you will have given your body a great workout.

Don’t make the mistake of going down fast. The risk of injury is much greater on the downhill and it does little for your fitness. You are also more likely to experience muscle soreness the next day if you push it on the way down.

4. Office mini-circuit

If you have the space in your office or can find some private (or public if you want to encourage others) space spend a few minutes doing a bodyweight circuit.

Get a skipping rope and do the following.

• 100-200 skips
• 20 push-ups
• 20 sit-ups
• 20 bodyweight squats

You can do this once every hour or do as many circuits as you can in your lunch break. Take a 30 second break between circuits or as you get fitter do them continuously.

There are 4 quick and simple ways to increase the amount of activity you get in a work day. These are substitutes for a regular exercise program before or after work, but by adding some movement to your day reduces your health risk and helps to prevent the all-to-common weight gain in the lead up to Christmas.

A recently reported study shows that you may need to do less than five intervals to get an improvement in fitness and better insulin sensitivity (which protects you from diabetes).

In the study, the researchers investigated the effects of a reduced-exertion high intensity interval (REHIT) exercise intervention on insulin sensitivity and aerobic capacity.

Twenty-nine healthy but sedentary young men and women were randomly assigned to the REHIT intervention (men, n = 7; women, n = 8) or a control group (men, n = 6; women, n = 8). Subjects assigned to the control groups maintained their normal sedentary lifestyle, whilst subjects in the training groups completed three exercise sessions per week for 6 weeks.

The 10-min exercise sessions consisted of low-intensity cycling (60 W) and one (first session) or two (all other sessions) brief ‘all-out’ sprints (10 s in week 1, 15 s in weeks 2–3 and 20 s in the final 3 weeks).

Aerobic capacity (the best measure of aerobic fitness) and the glucose and insulin response to a 75-g glucose load (OGTT) were determined before and 3 days after the exercise program.

Despite the subjects rating the exercise as fairly easy (ratings of perceived exertion (RPE 13 ± 1)), insulin sensitivity significantly increased by 28% in the male training group following the REHIT intervention .

Aerobic fitness (VO2max) increased in the male training (+15%) and female training (+12%) groups.

The researchers concluded that this novel approach to training may be a feasible exercise intervention to improve metabolic health and aerobic capacity.

Very short bursts of high intensity exercise (REHIT) may offer a genuinely time-efficient alternative to repeated intervals and conventional cardiorespiratory exercise training for improving risk factors of Type 2 Diabetes.

Imagine if you could maintain your fitness levels and guard against diabetes, and probably other metabolic conditions, by exercising for just 10 – 15 minutes a day, with only 2 minutes of hard effort.

No more excuses about not having enough time!

However, according to a recently published study physical activity indirectly modifies eating behavior and may suppress overeating by strengthening an area of the brain responsible for executive function.

Researchers from Boston reviewed available literature on eating behavior at a neurocognitive level and the impact of physical activity on cognition and the brain to investigate whether physical activity and eating behavior share a common neurocognitive mechanism. (They wanted to see how exercise affected the area of the brain that control decision-making and goal setting)

The investigators identified a common neurocognitive link, which related to executive functions relying on brain circuits located in the prefrontal cortex.

apparently the brain processes have a limited capacity, and undergo strain in an obesogenic environment, where there is ample food and constant messages to eat. The increased demand, overuse, and/or subsequent impairment of these neurocognitive resources were likely to generate impulses to overeat, leading to weight gain and obesity. (This area of the brain gets worn out and people end up giving in to urges to eat)

The researchers found that physical activity enhances the area of the brain for executive functions, and goal-oriented behavior, which are necessary for inhibiting impulsive-eating. Facilitating top-down inhibitory control by increasing physical activity is likely to help suppress the drive to overeat. (People who exercise have better control over the desire to eat and are able to stop eating, even when there is plenty of food available)

So what does it mean?

Although the thought of how far you have to walk or run just to burn up breakfast is enough to make you think it isn’t worth the effort, this finding confirms the theory that regular exercise helps people to control the urges to overeat.

To those people who spruik the latest diet and tell you that exercise only makes you eat more, this research shows that isn’t the case. In fact, just the opposite. Exercise strengthens that part of the brain that you use to set goals and make decisions that affect your health and your success.

As the research continues, I suspect we will find that being fit and exercising regularly has much greater impact on the brain than once thought.

Most successful people admit they couldn’t achieve what they do if they weren’t fit.

Are you fit enough to achieve the things you want?

Getting up early to exercise before work? Or fitting in some exercise after work when you really don’t feel like it?

Perhaps the idea of holding off exercising until you retire and have more time is an appealing thought.

Especially given that the real impact of low levels of physical fitness and muscle strength occur in older populations and are associated with increased risk of health problems, loss of independence, and shorter survival times.

Researchers have just reported on a study in which they examined the associations of physical activity across adulthood with physical performance and strength in midlife in a group of British men and women that they followed since birth in March 1946.

The researchers stated that as the global population ages, there is a growing need to identify modifiable factors across life that influence physical performance and strength in later life.

The study found that there are cumulative benefits of physical activity across adulthood on physical performance in mid-life.

They suggested that increased activity should be promoted early in adulthood to ensure the maintenance of physical performance in later life and that promotion of leisure time activity is likely to become increasingly important in younger populations as people’s daily routines become more sedentary.”

In the study they analyzed self-reported leisure time physical activity (LTPA) levels at 36, 43 and 53 years of age. During the 53-year investigation, grip strength, standing balance, and chair rise times were measured as indicators of strength and physical performance.

Grip strength is a measure of upper-body muscle condition. Chair-rise times are associated with lower body strength and power, as well as cardiorespiratory fitness. Standing balance requires mental concentration and subtle motor control and measures a number of neurophysiological and sensory systems.

Participants who were more active at all three ages showed better performance on the chair-rise test. Persons more active at ages 43 and 53 had better performance on the standing balance test, even after adjusting for other variables. Physical activity and grip strength were not associated in women and, in men, only physical activity at age 53 was associated with grip strength.

The investigators state that the findings in relation to chair rising and standing balance performance suggest that promotion of physical activity across adulthood would have beneficial effects on physical performance later in life and hence the functional health and quality of life of the aging population.

While getting out of a chair, keeping your balance and gripping objects may not seem difficult activities for you now, being able to keep doing them for the rest of your life is very important. It is the inability to do these that puts you at risk of losing your independence and suffering injuries due to falls.

The key message from this study is that it is safer and more effective to maintain your strength and fitness throughout your life than wait until you get older and try to regain it.

From my experience, both personally and with clients, it is easier to stay fit than to get fit.

So next time that little voice says you are too busy to exercise and why don’t you wait until you have more time, remember that what you do now has a major effect on what you will be able to do in years to come.

Would you go or would you politely decline (even though you really like to catch up with your old friends)?

The thought of seeing people you haven’t seen can be a bit scary, especially if you haven’t maintained your fitness.

I’m currently in San Diego for the wedding of a friend I was at University with over 25 years ago. I’ve been catching up with old friends I studied, lived and exercised with all those years ago. I also got to meet the Professor I studied under for my Masters Degree

As always at these events, there was a lot of laughter and reminiscing about the things we used to do. It was There were also some valuable lessons to be learned.

Here’s some of them -

Keep doing what you’ve always done

It was obvious who had kept up there fitness. Those that had, looked just the same (other than a bit less or lighter coloured hair). They hadn’t put on weight and still had the same physique they had, even though 25 years had passed.

Those who had kept exercising, had maintained their muscle tissue and more obviously hadn’t got fatter. Some were even leaner than they were all those years ago. The myth that it is normal to get fatter and heavier as you get older might be the norm, but it’s not what has to happen.

Stay strong

One of the biggest risks to your fitness and health as you get older is that you suffer an injury, can’t exercise for a while and fall out of the habit. Maintaining your strength is one of the safeguards against injury.

Do a variety of activities

Those who were the fittest were the ones who did a variety of exercise. By doing so they were able to keep active even if a minor injury or circumstances meant they couldn’t do their normal routine. Doing different activities also means your body isn’t doing the same thing every day; increasing the likelihood of injury or fatigue.

Keep flexible

There is no doubt that as you get older muscles and tendons lose their elasticity if you don’t keep using them in their full range of motion. Incorporating some stretching, whether it be Yoga, Pilates or some other form is essential.

Get your partner involved

Those who had maintained their fitness all had life partners who valued their own health and fitness and made it a priority in their life.

Find friends to exercise with

Although not essential, most of those who kept active did so with other people. The social aspect of exercise is one of the things that keeps people doing it, especially when life gets busy or stressful. Don’y under-estimate the power of those around you to keep you going when you don’t necessarily feel like it.

Don’t let time be your excuse

All of the people I talked to led busy lives. They worked in demanding jobs or had their own businesses and had family commitments that could easily have stopped them from exercising. But they put their own health as a priority and made the time to stay fit. Even those who still had younger children fitted in time for exercise.

There is probably nothing in that list that is new or surprising. Seeing friends from a quarter of a century ago just reinforced the importance of being active and staying fit.

It’s a lot easier to maintain your fitness than it is to lose it and try t get it back when you are older.

Staying fit also makes going to reunions a pleasure not something to avoid or fear.