Fitness Tips & Tricks to make you look (and feel) younger

What steps do you currently have in place to ensure you become healthier, stronger and fitter each day? There are many health habits we can implement to ensure we develop both physically and mentally and find that happier more confident place. Here are four very simple, yet highly effective, healthy decisions you can start to make immediately:

Eat more Thin Skinned Fruits

Eating more thin skinned fruits will provide us with an abundance of antioxidants and anti–inflammatory effects, especially useful for athletes and committed exercise enthusiasts to help speed up and improve recovery. 

Antioxidants work to defend the body’s cells from the damaging effects of free radicals and other harsh chemicals. Free radicals present themselves during and after intense exercise sessions or can be acquired from our external environment i.e. pollution.

Thin skinned fruits need extra protection from the sun, unlike their thick skinned counterparts i.e. banana, pineapple, mango. This is the reason they produce plentiful amounts of antioxidants that we can benefit from.

Thin skinned fruits include strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, black currants, red currants, cherries – basically choose any fruit that is either dark red, dark blue or dark purple and would stain your clothes and you’re good to go!

Do More Sprinting Exercises

Sprinting over short distances is what our bodies were designed to do, yet many of us don’t do it enough and our bodies suffer both physically and aesthetically.

Quit the boring and tedious 60 minute treks on the treadmill or stationary bike five days a week and intergrate more sprinting to your exercise regime.

Some major benefits of sprinting include burning more unwanted body fat, boosting our metabolism and increasing Vo2 max.

Sprinting should be integrated with caution – you can learn more about the benefits and special considerations of sprinting by checking out Get Leaner, Fitter and Stronger With High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

Eat More Leafy Greens

Leafy green vegetables should be a significant part of our diet as we search for optimal health and fitness.

These foods include spinach, broccoli, collard greens, kale, and many more like this.

As mentioned earlier with the thin skinned fruits, these foods are also dark in colour and provide lots of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals.

Another major benefit of eating leafy greens is the effect they have on our body’s pH levels.

All of our body’s cells are slightly alkaline, and must maintain some alkalinity to be able to function and remain healthy. Any imbalance in our pH levels can effect our entire body. These effects are most noticeable with our digestive, immune and circulatory systems if we become even slightly acidic.

Optimal pH levels should read between 6.4 to 6.8 for saliva, and 6.0 to 7.5 for urine – eating leafy greens will help us to achieve this and avoid entering into acidic states.

Back when we were hunter gatherers (or rather when our ancestors were) our diet was predominantly made up of these alkalising foods.

It has been suggested that as we moved around the land grazing we could well have eaten a supermarket shopping bag full of leafy greens.

We need to get back to this, perhaps not shopping bags full, but we certainly could all benefit from eating more leafy greens.

Spinach offers the most alkalising benefits and it is a really good idea to try to use more foods like this everyday. You can add chopped spinach to recipes like omelettes and scrambled egg – or add it to smoothies.

Do more Resistance Training Exercises

Muscle is metabolically active and requires energy for maintenance and function. This means that the more and better quality muscle we create, the more fat we will potentially burn.

Research suggests we can increase our basal metabolism by around 15%, this can be around 300 kcal, which is more than the energy in a mars bar – pretty cool, don’t you think? Not an excuse to add one each day though, unfortunately.

Most of us would consider resistance training for the benefits it provides to the way we look, but it goes so much deeper than that. We can gain significant improvements in our posture, balance, coordination, mood, bone strength, cardiovascular health and plenty more.

Resistance training needs to be consistent for us to get satisfactory results. We need to change it up every now and again to break through plateaus, but we need to perform the same routine long enough for us to make physical adaptations – we basically need to perform the same routine until it stops working, then we change something.

Changing things up too often will never allow us to adapt to the stresses we are placing on our muscles – consistency folks, remember it.