SELF HEALTH + HEALING

Leading a healthy lifestyle will improve your overall health, and increase your energy and level of fitness

These days as people work more and their lives get busier, they have much less time for themselves. It’s easy for people to forget about taking care of themselves and what’s most important, their health and fitness. However, leading a healthy lifestyle will improve your overall health, and increase both your energy and level of fitness. Here are 5 tips on how to lead a healthy lifestyle:

"Want to skip your workout? We're going to bust every excuse you've got."

Everyone knows there are so many good reasons to work out. It helps your heart and bones stay strong, keeps you limber, increases endurance, helps maintain weight, and gives you more energy — not to mention bragging rights when you can beat someone in an arm wrestling match. Unfortunately, the list of excuses to skip workouts is almost as long. We’re too tired, too busy, too stressed, too broke. It’s too hot or too cold. 

"You woke up today and said to yourself: “Today is going to be different.”

First and foremost, congratulations!"

That’s a big step.  

Now, you start trying to figure out how to actually get started:

Want to continue to crush well into your 80s? Here’s how.

Last February, 59-year-old Ned Overend, aka “The Lung,” aka “Deadly Nedly,” won the first National Fatbike Championships, held in Ogden, Utah. Fat Bike Nats isn’t exactly the Tour de France, but it’s no charity ride, either. Overend had to compete against a field of much younger pros, including former national mountain bike champion Travis Brown, 46, on a tough 19-mile course.

It’s tempting to dismiss Overend as a genetic freak, an outlier who defies comparison with the rest of us. He has dominated nearly every sport he’s entered since the early ’90s, from cross-country mountain bike racing to off-road triathlon. But even among the genetically gifted—and many elite athletes are—Overend is unique in his competitive longevity. Which is the reason he’s also one of the dozen or so athletes spotlighted in Joe Friel’s latest book, Fast After 50 (Velo Press), part of a growing library devoted to salt-and-pepper chargers past (and occasionally well past) the half-century mark.

In the modern world, 'fitness' has become less about being healthy, more about pursuing unrealistic body ideals.

The concept of ‘fitness’ is more popular than ever. Terms are being thrown about like ‘clean-eating’, ‘protein cake’, ‘fitspiration’. Something fundamental to human life, taking care of our body, has been turned into a fad in the same way that people cute puppies or hipster fashion has.

"Keeping fit was associated with a patriotic sense of proving a strong, competent member of society. Now it is much more ego-driven."

But is this really a healthy way to look after our bodies?

The creator of the immensely popular Tabata H.I.I.T method shows you how to get more training done in less time.

Japanese professor Izumi Tabata has become a household name in the world of fitness and high-performance training, thanks to his clinically tested, four-minute interval training system.

M&F: How effective is tabata at burning fat vs. higher-volume programs?

Professor Tabata: We haven’t done specific experiments on burning body fat. However, our research has looked at calorie burning. So we know that Tabata not only burns the same calories in four minutes as an hour of steady-state exercise (biking or jogging), but there’s also a significant “after burn” effect, where an additional 150 calories are being burned up to 12 hours after you leave the gym.