Fitness regime for a healthy body

MAKE yourself proud and have the fit body you have always wanted.

With New Year and Christmas just around the corner, make the effort to shape your body towards it. Currently I am near the banks of the Zambezi river on a backpacking holiday around the globe looking for fresh ideas on fitness regime.

As I have mentioned earlier, you need to be prepared and be ready for the fitness regime you are about to take.

For those who are currently on holiday, don't cut your fitness model just because you are travelling. Make yourself proud ... prepare yourself mentally and motivate yourself towards positive fitness training. If you have major changes going on in your life, or you're just frustrated about where you are in your fitness regime, it's easy to get trapped in a cycle of depression, bad moods and frustration. I know, I've been there. When I've had a particularly hard time, I would just feel paralysed. Sometimes I feel like as if I am stuck in a quagmire, and I try to pull my way out of it. When we feel bad, it's hard to "feel good" again.

Falling back on a framework of fitness steps does help, because we function well when we have a set of steps to follow.

The first step is to drop all your negative thoughts and push to the gym or park nearest to you. Your state of mind should be aimed at pursuing exercises.

Exercise helps your body and soul to relax, a great therapy indeed. Adrenalin is unleashed to your veins, thus engaging the entire nervous system. It's like a super-charged bike charging for the finish line. This is how you feel during and after training. The reason for this is that these steps take the emotion out of our situation and give us direction to act.

Remember these fitness steps ... Duck and Cover. Stop, Drop, and Roll. When you know with certainty what to do next, you're in a much stronger position to take action, even when you're panicking. (And it doesn't have to be words, either just think of Lamaze breathing, which expectant mothers practice well ahead of time so they can go through the rigorous period of pregnancy.)

Now that you've established what you need to focus on, for instance your mind set, you know what you need to do for your fitness. It's time you address what type of exercises you need to take to build up that fitness feeling. Action is important because it's extremely difficult to feel your way into a different way of behaving.

When you're feeling scared or depressed, you just can't manufacture emotion to get yourself going. It is no great surprise that our modern and high-tech lifestyles are becoming increasingly sedentary with more time now spent in front of a computer television screen and less time spent doing physical activity than ever before. It is also no great surprise that leading sedentary lifestyle increases the development of health complications as compared to those who exercise regularly.

When you're struggling with changing a sedentary habit or pulling yourself out of a state of fitness depression, it's tempting to think that the cause of your failure is due to a lack of willpower, talent or commitment.

It can be a crushing experience to dwell on how hard it is to take your life to the fitness level you'd hoped it to be right now. But the problem may have nothing to do with willpower. It may have nothing to do with "you" at all.

The real problem may be with the identity you've constructed for yourself.

When you construct an opinion about fitness, you developed it based on a number of factors: what you've heard or read about people saying about health and fitness regimes, what you've seen, and (most importantly), what you've decided those observations mean.

You may decide fitness could be generous or selfish, fun or boring, a success or a failure, based on the way you put those pieces together (whether your observations are correct or not).

And once you construct that "first impression", it's very, very likely that it will never change. If your first impression is overwhelmingly good, then you'll "colour" everything fitness and health does in a positive light. If your first impression is bad, then everything that person does gets coloured negatively (and you've probably experienced this firsthand if someone gets the wrong impression about you).

In fact, your "first impression" may be completely influenced by what someone else has said about physical appearance, thus locking in that perceived identity forever.

What's even more tragic, though, is how this phenomenon comes back to bite you. If you believe people have negative impressions of your fitness looks or perfomance, then you start to "colour" the perception of your own identity as well.

Stay positive and create that fitness positive mood, be proud of your fitness thoughts and be confident of your performances during aerobic class, body building and any charity exercises you take.

Have this thoughts firmly in your mind and you will see yourself with a dream body you have longed ever. This will definitely serve as your new year's resolution.

The writer is a fitness consultant in Zimbabwe.

The Brunei Times