Healthy Living gets off the couch and into the gym

The clock is ticking away and today the first quarter of the year is up, it also means that Easter is only a few weeks ahead. And if you haven’t, now is a good time to get back into an exercise regime.  There are a number of things that you can do to jumpstart your exercise routine.

Marleni Cuellar, Reporting

It happens to most fitness junkies, weekend warriors and those on never ending weight loss programs. There are countless reasons why our exercise routines occasionally come to a pause or sometimes extended break.  But the only way to shake off the guilt of the dusty sneakers in the corner is to get back on track.

Ed Williams, Health & Fitness Coach, Royal Wellness Center

Ed Williams

“The first and foremost thing I would say is be: This time do it right.”

Ed Williams is the Health & Fitness coach at the Royal Wellness Center. He has been a fitness enthusiast for decades and has taken up the profession of health & fitness coaching for the past 20 years. He offers some of his advice on how to jumpstart your workout routine. His first is to tweak your goals

Ed Williams

“Set Smart Goal, smart is an acronym and it means: specific, measurable, achievable, and the R is for realistic and the T is for setting a time a time limit you know for this goal to be achieved.”

Ed says setting unrealistic goals is setting yourself up for failure from the start. A SMART goal is the starting point; it should be coupled with consistency and a positive attitude.

Ed Williams

“It’s much better to do 15 minutes a day consistently a day. You’ll get much better results than to just go crazy like that I call that fire type approach as oppose to running water which is consistent. Start by telling yourself the right things. i usually coach my clients about self talk. Self talk is very important. It’s important to realize that when the mind speaks the body listens and does accordingly. The body is a highly adaptive machine. So a lot of time we say negative things that does not necessarily, we shoot ourselves in the leg. basically we wonder why we fall down but we did it to ourselves.”

And his advice for the first days back in the gym: Start Slowly.

Ed Williams

“If you over do it in the beginning you’ll end up stiff and sore and unable to move then there’s going to be no continuity. so the thing to do and again this where the importance of some help is to start gradually. But start out like you’re going to run a marathon not like you’re going to do a 60 yard dash because then you gonna run out of steam you know.”

According to Ed, the rule that applies here is the same rule that applies to each and every workout, what he calls ‘The Anatomy of a Workout’

Ed Williams

Ed Williams

“The body has a system that is pretty much like the gears of a vehicle. When you start an activity you start out in first gear.  But gear in terms of where the energy is coming from. First gear is glycogen in the blood sugar in the blood.  Sugar is like burning coal. It’s a lot of sooth and byproducts and stuff like that and there is lactic acid build up and there is fatigue. so once you’re burning sugar you feel fatigued. You feel this urge to stop doing whatever you’re doing. And then…we in Belize say and then you break your wind but has nothing to do with wind. All of sudden then you can go go go but what happens is that your body now shift gears from burning sugar to burning fat. Now burning fat is like butane gas. There’s no sooth. There’s no lactic acid build up. There’s minimal fatigue.  Normally I recommend that there be 4 specific parts to your workout. Any workout all the time, a warm up and some stretches together which prepares you for the workout itself and then a cool down. Those are very specific and very important.”

Ed says the frustration people face from lack of results usually comes from misunderstanding this very same concept.  His recommendation: Warm-ups & stretches to burn off the sugar should extend for 20 to 25 minutes; the workout itself for another 20 – 25 and the Cool down requiring 5 to ten minutes.

Ed Williams

“Earl Nightingale said: life’s greatest opportunities always come brilliantly disguised as problems and challenges.   As I look out here on marine parade in the evenings what I see is Belizean Olympians. Everyone is an Olympian. It’s important to feel good about yourself whilst doing exercise. So I want to encourage everyone regardless if you’ve ever done any exercise in your life think of yourself as an Olympian. This is your Olympics and you wanna be proud it and really get excited about it.”