The following choices are relevant whether you already exercise regularly or are just starting out on your exercise programme.

 

 

1) Breathing

 

This may seem a somewhat strange selection for the first choice you can make on a daily basis. I mean, you breathe all the time! However, making a conscious effort to pay attention to your breathing will bring about a myriad of health benefits which in turn will translate into improved health as the body feels fitter, less stressed, and more capable of doing what you ask it to do.

 

Consider for a moment how you breathe. Take a few breaths and see what you notice. If you look around you, you will notice many people breathing from their chest in a shallow way. You may have even noticed the same about the way you breathe.

When you breathe from the chest in a shallow way, you are more likely to stimulate your sympathetic nervous system ie your stress nervous system, leading to a feeling of more stress and less relaxation. Think about a time when you were scared – it is likely you began breathing from the chest, stimulating the ‘fight or flight’ response, preparing you to face the danger or run away from it.

 

While this is useful sometimes, if you breathe shallowly throughout the day, you will constantly be stimulating your stress hormones. Done over a continual basis, this can lead to adrenal fatigue, exhaustion, not to mention that you will be in a permanently ‘catabolic’ state (breaking down tissue) so you will not be giving the body a chance to repair itself or get fitter and stronger from your training.

 

Breathing deeply from the stomach brings about amazing feelings of relaxation and can be incredibly beneficial. When you breathe from the stomach, imagine inflating your stomach like a balloon as you inhale and slowly let the air out as you exhale; there should be no movement in the chest or the shoulders. If you have been breathing from the chest on a constant basis for some time, this may feel slightly odd and difficult to do initially but perseverance is worthwhile. Even just 10 breaths in this fashion, taking 40-60 seconds, will immediately bring about a sense of relaxation as the sympathetic nervous system will not be stimulated. In fact, it will go some way towards stimulating your parasympathetic (rest and repair) nervous system, ensuring increased recovery from training and competition and improved performance and mental clarity.

 

Therefore, you can choose to breathe predominantly in a relaxed manner or in a way that brings a stressful response.

 

2) Thoughts

 

Your thoughts really do shape everything you do. You have to think something into being; you will not do something unless you think about doing it first, consciously or unconsciously. All behaviour is part of a mental process that takes place in your mind first and even self-esteem, self-belief, action and performance are dependent in many respects on the mental processes taking place in your mind.

 

People are often told to look on the bright side of life or look for the silver lining to the cloud. Yes, these are clichés but they ring true. Being able to maintain a more positive outlook can be beneficial to your health and fitness.

If your thoughts are predominantly negative or limiting in nature, this will have a profound affect on what you perceive you are capable of and what you believe to be true about you. It may be useful to consider for a moment the thoughts you have been holding in your mind about yourself or a given situation. Are they positive or negative?

 

For example, if you believe you are someone who gets nervous when talking to other people, you will continually tell yourself this is true and act accordingly, which only serves to reinforce the initial belief! Conversely, if you believe yourself to be confident and tell yourself this is true, it is more likely that you will act to confirm this is true.

 

It is important to realise that you control your thoughts, rather than the other way round. Or put another way, if you are not in charge of your thought processes, who is?! Anything you think has an effect on you and your body, either positively or negatively and research on biofeedback has backed this up. This is clearly demonstrated if you think about an event or a person that may have upset you in the past. If you really think about it, it is easy to make yourself feel upset again. The same is therefore true about stressful situations, anxious ones, pessimistic ones and so on. However, the same is therefore true for positive events and positive feelings and so it is also possible to fully re-create these empowering feelings by moving them to the forefront of your mind.

 

Thinking back to that positive outlook mentioned previously, it is now being recognised as fact that those with a positive outlook win more often, achieve more of their potential, live longer and are generally happier and have better health. Developing the ability to maintain positive thoughts and a positive outlook will undoubtedly help you to improve your general health and fitness and allow you to perform consistently to your potential.

 

There are no idle thoughts. Therefore, on a daily basis, you can choose to focus on positive, empowering thoughts, or you can fill your mind with a series of negative, limiting thoughts.

 

 

3) Eating

 

Choices 3 and 4 are very much interlinked but are nonetheless worthy of mentions in their own right.

 

It has been often repeated, but it is no less true as a result, that you are what you eat. Millions of cells within your body are replaced every day; in fact, almost all your cells will be replaced over the course of several months. The food we eat effectively determines how our cells are replaced and rebuilt and given that we are essentially a mass of cells, it should be clear that what we eat is important to your general health and wellbeing and subsequently your performance levels. You can therefore ask yourself if you’d rather your cells were made up of high fat, high sugar chocolate biscuits or some quality, organic vegetables. Which do you imagine will build a stronger cell full of energy, health and vitality? The choice of what foods to eat is one that you make on a daily basis.

 

It is admittedly difficult to make positive food choices all the time and you do not want to feel you are depriving yourself. However, when selecting your food choices, it can be useful to question whether what you are about to eat will take you towards your goal of optimum vitality and improved performance, or whether it will lead you away from it. Even if you know that you like the taste, is that moment of gratification worth it? If you at least consider these questions, you will be making an informed choice.

 

The topics of food consumption, food production, food technologies and so on are beyond the scope of this article but suffice to say that not all food is created equal. Organic produce is free from pesticides and other chemicals used regularly in commercial farming and food production and there is really no knowing what these chemicals do inside our body. Research has also consistently shown that organic produce contains more beneficial vitamins, minerals and enzymes, all extremely health for the body. On this area, if you eat meat products, it is also worth considering that, you are what you eat and you are what the animals ate so ensuring that you eat organic meats will go a long way towards ensuring good health and high levels of performance. I guarantee that research into these subjects will produce some extremely interesting results for you and will assist you in making your choices.

(A little caveat here – eating ‘organic cookies/cakes etc’ is not making a positive food choice! You want to choose to keep sugar and flour intake to a minimum, especially refined products, and base your diet on vegetables, fruits and meats if applicable)

 

Making positive food choices is important on a continual basis. If, as mentioned previously, cells are replaced continually and all cells wills be replaced over several months, having ‘phases’ of making good food choices will not produce consistent good health or consistently high levels of performance. This is something that benefits from being habitual.

 

Therefore, on a daily basis, you can choose to eat quality, organic food in order to achieve optimum health, vitality and performance or you can choose to eat poor quality, nutritionally poor food which will lead to poor health and decreased performance levels in whatever you do.

 

4) Drinking

 

Leading on from choice 3, what you choose to drink is as important as what you choose to eat. There is a dizzying amount of drinks available, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic and again, your choice of what to drink can lead you towards optimum health or undermine your efforts. Further, quite often what you may think is a good choice is anything but.

 

The vast majority of people have, if you’ll excuse the language, a C.R.A.P diet. That is to say, their diet is abundant in Caffeine, Refined products, Alcohol & Processed foods. This relates to food also but relates strongly to what you drink. The combination of the above C.R.A.P components of a diet sees people fluctuating wildly between high energy levels and low energy levels, searching out the next pick-me-up, whether in the form of a caffeinated drink or something sweet, to make it through the day. This is certainly not conducive to improving and maintaining health.

 

Your body needs water to function. The body is made up of 75% water and it is vital for the many processes that take place within it. Your daily recommended intake of water can be worked out by using the following formula –

 

Bodyweight x 0.033 = litres of water required

 

It is important to note that this does take into account water contained within vegetables and fruits (assuming you are eating them – see choice 3!). However, this is pure water – not fruit water, cordials, juices, soft drinks etc and more will be required if you exercise (see choice 5!) due to the effect of perspiration. Should your intake not be sufficient, you will suffer the effects of acute dehydration in the short-term and chronic dehydration in the long-term. Some interesting research has hypothesised that many diseases and conditions, such as hypertension, asthma and Alzheimers may have their roots in chronic dehydration. From a performance perspective, performance levels drop when even 1% dehydration levels are experienced. The importance of maintaining good hydration is clear; among other benefits it will bring increased energy, health and performance.

A word of advice however. If you feel you may be chronically dehydrated, increase your intake gradually. It may be uncomfortable if you dramatically increase your water intake.

 

Caffeine, alcohol and soft drinks do not contribute to your water intake, no matter how much you would like them to! In fact, it is often recommended that you drink an additional glass of water for each glass/cup of these drinks you have, simply to redress the balance. Caffeine will cause unproductive fluctuations in energy levels, alcohol is a quick-release sugar, high in calories with no nutritional benefit and most soft drinks contain an unhealthy cocktail of chemicals. Your training and subsequent fitness levels will benefit immeasurably by reducing your consumption of these drinks, or cutting them out completely. Perhaps more importantly, your health will benefit too.

 

Therefore, on a daily basis, you can choose to drink a multitude of drinks which will deplete your energy, decrease health and performance, or you can refresh your body with the fluid it needs, in appropriate amounts, to improve health and performance.

 

5) Movement / exercise

 

Exercise is an extremely important component in order to achieve optimum health. In terms of looking to make improvements in health, fitness and performance, exercise is vital. The basis of almost all Performance Enhancement programmes in sport is on a solid exercise programme.

 

From a general health point of view, regular exercise is classified as ‘walking for 20 minutes, 3 times per week’. Incredibly, only approximately 8-12% of people carry out this incredibly low classification of regular exercise. No wonder the health of the nation is failing and disease is taking over.

 

It makes little difference if you have the most scientifically prepared structured training programme or not, exercise is exercise and on a daily basis, you can choose to ‘move your body’ or not. A well structured programme either put together for you or by you, will produce better results as it is likely to provide progressive overload to the neuromuscular system resulting in adaptation and continued response. Such a training programme will also factor in rest and recovery and this should also be considered as part of your daily ‘movement’ or ‘exercise’ too when required.

 

A structured exercise schedule will provide you with the framework of what is required on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis in order to improve your physical condition. However, it is really then up to you whether you choose to follow it and actually do it. As stated previously, this can take the form of a training session, playing sport, active rest (cross-training, flexibility, mobility), or a combination of things. Whatever the focus or the specific cycle of your training, you can choose to do something beneficial for your body each and every day.

 

Hippocrates stated that ‘walking is man’s best medicine’. Our body is a truly amazing piece of ‘machinery’ and is designed to move and be active. The consequences of inactivity are numerous but the benefits, from a purely health and wellbeing perspective, are phenomenal. This includes such things as reduced risk of disease, lower blood pressure, decreased risk of conditions such as diabetes and osteoporosis, increased energy, increased ability to handle stress. From a performance perspective, benefits of physical training go on to include improved flexibility, strength, power, speed, agility, quickness as well as other benefits, which will undoubtedly lead to an improvement in performance levels.

 

Injury prevention wants to be a significant emphasis of any physical training programme, whether training for performance or not. In fact, physical or physiological improvements are almost certainly secondary to injury prevention in terms of objectives of your training. It goes without saying that you will not be able to function at your best if you are constantly beset by injuries. The body functions as a kinetic chain (ie, muscles work together to produce movement, force etc) and if a part of this chain is injured or weak or not working properly, this will affect your movement or strength in anything you do on a daily basis. Many simple evaluations will be able to tell you if this is the case and again, each day is a choice to prevent injury or dysfunction, treat and correct it if it is present, or leave it and allow the situation to worsen. By taking the former option, you will work to improve your general health and performance levels without question and go a long way to preventing such injuries or dysfunction in the future.

 

Therefore, whatever the current focus of your physical training, whether for health or performance, on a daily basis, you can choose not to move or exercise and risk injury, dysfunction or reduced health, or you can choose to incorporate some movement or exercise and undoubtedly increase your health and performance levels.

 

 

6) Sleep

 

Again, this may seem like an odd ‘choice’ to include. I mean, we all sleep don’t we? To a certain extent this is true but sleep is an incredibly misunderstood and under-estimated component of improved health and performance. An appreciation of your body’s sleep/wake cycle will enable you to see the importance in this simple act and how, by paying attention to it, you can reap benefits you may not have considered before, both by ensuring you get to bed on time and by having an appropriate winding down process, free from stimulation to the senses.

 

The body has a natural cycle throughout the day, called a circadian rhythm, which is ‘a natural physiological cycle that persists even in the absence of external cues’. What this means is that your body is hard-wired to a sleep/wake cycle, usually in conjunction with dark and light respectively. There exists in this cycle, a symbiotic relationship between your ‘alert’ hormones and your ‘rest and repair’ hormones – when one is activated, the other is suppressed. In a natural sleep/wake cycle, our alert hormones, such as cortisol rise as the sun rises, peaking in the morning and remaining relatively high through midday activities. Levels begin to drop in the afternoon and especially so when the sun goes down. In contrast, repair hormones, such as melatonin, are low during the morning and the day and then start to rise in the afternoon and especially when the sun goes down, peaking late night before dropping off again in preparation for the next release of cortisol. As you can see, there is a direct comparison between the two cycles. This is important to appreciate because your body will produce alert hormones in the presence of light or other stimulation. Our physiology was developed thousands of years ago and has not changed much in that time. Therefore, our body reacts in the same way to a modern-day stressor as it would have done to a stressor centuries ago, by releasing cortisol. This is important because things such as bright lights in the home, late-night TV, computer games, working late and so on, will keep the level of alert hormones raised long into the evening and the night, since they can take hours to exit the bloodstream. If you consider the symbiotic relationship mentioned above, you will remember that if the alert hormones are being kept activated, the rest and repair hormones will be suppressed. If this is the situation, your body will not be able to repair itself adequately from any physical training, any mentally taxing activities or simply from daily life, and so on. It is well known that those people with repeatedly disrupted sleep/wake cycles suffer more injuries, illness, infection and general lack of energy. By respecting your natural circadian rhythm, you will improve your health and performance without question.

 

Physical repair takes place between 10pm-2am and psychological repair takes place between 2am-6am so in order to maximise your recovery, you want to get to sleep closer to 10pm than 11pm, ensuring that you have limited your exposure to any stimulants prior to this, ie TV bright lights.

 

Therefore, on a daily basis, you can choose to disrupt your natural sleep/wake cycle by exposing yourself to many internal and external stimulants, leading to lack of quality rest and repair time and inevitable ill health and injury, or you can respect your sleep/wake cycle, limit exposure to stimulant, maximise your rest and repair time and look forward to increased health and improved performance.

 

 

 

 

To finish then, a choice is something you have control of. Quite often we think that something ‘just happens’ or ‘that’s just the way it is’ but if you stop to consider it for a moment, it becomes apparent that it is a choice. Above are 6 reasonably simple and straightforward choices you do have a large amount of control of on a daily basis. Some choices I hope you view as being more constructive towards achieving increased health and performance. It may be difficult to make those constructive choices 100% of the time but if you do more often than not, you will receive incredibly positive results; even realising that you do have a choice is empowering.

 

Keep these 6 choices in mind and look forward to the benefits!