15 Fitness Tips for Beginners: How to Ease into a Healthy Lifestyle
Losing weight can be incredibly difficult to do and maintaining that weight loss can be even more difficult! The best way to stay fit and healthy is to totally change your lifestyle to reflect healthier choices. These fitness tips for beginners are designed to help you to live a healthier life from here on out. You’ll be given small steps that you can incorporate into your daily life.
In this post you'll find:
- How to Start a Healthy Lifestyle
- Choose To Move More Everyday
- Go No Soda
- Load Your Plate With Veggies
- Go To Sleep Sooner
- Make Meal Prep A Ritual
- Specific Fitness Tips For Beginners
- 1. Make Your Workout Worth It
- 2. Remember To Eat Healthily
- 3. Change Your Eating Habits
- 4. Plan Out Your Routine
- 5. Make A 100% Commitment
- 6. Don’t Play the Comparison Game
- 7. Keep It Simple
- 8. Prepare For Your New Routine
- 9. Remember Cardio
- 10. Use A Visual Inspiration
How to Start a Healthy Lifestyle
There’s a lot of mindset work that’s involved in maintaining a healthy weight and lifestyle. As humans, we tend to know the difference between a smart decision, and a decision that leaves a lot to be desired. When it comes to weight loss, we seem to get stuck on making “less than ideal decisions.”
So where does that leave us? Well, you could keep doing what you always do, and get the results you always do. Or, you can institute some smart decisions- choices that will improve your life for the long haul. When you decide in your mind to live a healthy life and you start to put into motion all the little action steps that you know comes along with your decision, success will be yours.
So the first step is to decide to live a healthy life. Really truly mean that decision. Get your mind on board then get all your family (in your house) on board too.
Let’s dive right into some fitness tips for beginners who’ve just made a smart choice.
Choose To Move More Everyday
Burning calories is the name of the game when it comes to sustainable weight loss, regardless of if you need to lose 1 or 100 pounds. Not a fan of the gym? Not an excuse. There are simple decisions you can make that can have a profound effect on your weight loss efforts. For example, how about walking a few extra flights of stairs on your way to the office?
Maybe you work on the 10th floor, so why not stop off at the 7th and walk the rest? Increase this week by week till you take the stairs up and back whenever you’re at the office. You need to make deliberate decisions if weight loss or fitness is your goal. It does not come about by mere chance.
No stairs in your daily routine? Take a stop a few blocks away from home and walk your way home. The afternoon is likely to be cooler than the morning, so the sun should not deter you.
Worried about winter? Do some activity at home. An extremely effective exercise that does not require expensive equipment is the step up. Pile high a few encyclopedias or directories left over from your paper days and get moving. Turn on Youtube and find your favourite type of workout be that a 20 minute HIIT session, some Zumba or even a dancehall or belly-dancing class.
Go No Soda
You knew it was coming – no soda. No regular, and definitely- NO DIET. Soda in every form is bad, regardless of what the money hungry manufacturers’ claim. Sure, diet may be free of calories, but that does not mean it is free of adverse effects.
In fact, many of the low sugar alternatives found in diet soda can speed up your development of metabolic syndrome, which is worse than diabetes alone. Water needs to become the main beverage in your weight loss arsenal, but that does not mean it has to be bland. You are free to use coffee, tea, fruit infused water and more – just be sure you keep an eye on the sugar content.
Load Your Plate With Veggies
Love broccoli? Great! Then make it the cornerstone of your plate. Who cares how it looks? You definitely won’t in a few weeks when you see your body change dramatically. The rule is to load up on your favourite veggies, as they are typically low calorie, then follow with your protein of choice (meat, frequently), and finally maybe a little sweet potato or brown rice. The carbs are optional of course, as restricting them altogether is the fastest way to achieve weight loss. This is why the ketogenic diet is so effective.
Go To Sleep Sooner
You know the hundreds of benefits of sleep by now, but here’s one you don’t think of often; reducing caloric intake. The later you stay awake, the more likely you are to snack. Unnecessary snacking, more so late at night, can spoil a hard day of work and leave you moody as an extra bonus (ha!)
I am definitely guilty of the late night smackeroos, it’s at that time we tend to reach for the unhealthiest things in the fridge or cupboard. Go to bed earlier instead and wake up refreshed and happy that you didn’t late night binge eat.
Related: How to Wake up in the Morning Feeling Pumped
Make Meal Prep A Ritual
Fastest way to sabotage a diet plan? Hunger. Yes, when you’re hungry you don’t give two hoots about healthy, as long as it fills you. To compensate, make a decent amount of meals and freeze them in your favourite containers. That way, when you need food, it’s just a microwave session away, and your weight loss plan will remain intact.
As a blogger I have to say that meal prep has saved me immensely because I tend to be at the computer til that very lat hunger pang that makes me ravenous then I want the quickest thing so I can get back to work. If I didn’t have healthy food prepped, who knows what I would grab instead of something healthy.
Specific Fitness Tips For Beginners
If you’re thinking of starting a new fitness regime, use these tips to help make sure that you reach your goals.
1. Make Your Workout Worth It
If you want to get the most out of your workout, you need to remember that around 80% of the results that you get from your workout actually come from just 20% of your workout.
That means that in an hour’s session, only 12 minutes of the workout will contribute to the bulk of your results. You need to make those minutes really count. Use compound movements that work more than one muscle group at a time to really make the most of your time. On one day you’ll activate glutes, another, you’ll get a back workout in and yet another you’ll work your core.
You could also consider incorporating weight loss supplements like LeanBiome, known for its blend of prebiotics and probiotics.
2. Remember To Eat Healthily
Any body shaping goals can only be achieved by eating a healthy diet. When you’re in the gym, it becomes easier to think that you can get away with an unhealthy diet. You can’t out-gym a bad diet so it’s especially important to keep up your healthy diet while working out.
You should make sure that you eat in moderation, and remember that if you’re burning off more calories, you will need to eat that little bit more so that you have enough energy. Balance your nutrition and avoid fad dieting.
3. Change Your Eating Habits
You need to make sure that you eat properly as well as eating healthily. Eating properly includes eating at the right times of the day. Skipping breakfast is usually a bad idea and you shouldn’t eat too late in the evening either. Speak to a nutritionist or personal trainer about what would work for you and your new regime so that you can achieve your goals.
4. Plan Out Your Routine
To make sure that you know just when you’re going to be working out and when you can look forward to some downtime, you really should come up with a plan. Remember to include rest days and be realistic about how much time you can make free.
We get overly ambitious when we start a new fitness regimen and burn out quickly from it. A plan will help you to stick to your schedule as much as possible so that you don’t slide into the habit of skipping the gym, making your targets achievable.
5. Make A 100% Commitment
Remember, decision. You need to remember that your body transformation needs dedication from you. You can’t skip a day or two here and there, because you feel as though you deserve it. Plan when your rest day will be and stick to that. Even if you have a vacation planned, check out the local gym, and make sure to take an hour out of each day to continue to work out or plan physical activities int he sight-seeing Keep up with the healthy eating as much as possible too.
6. Don’t Play the Comparison Game
It’s easy to look at women in the gym and suddenly panic if you’re trying to lose weight and develop a fit or slender figure.
If you’re dedicated and consistent, you’ll get to your version of healthy sooner rather than later; it requires a particular plan and effort. If you stick to a plan that you’ve developed or your personal trainer has given you, you won’t go wrong.
7. Keep It Simple
You should remember that you are only starting out with fitness. In order to avoid injury and to avoid putting yourself off continuing with your training, you should make sure that you familiarize yourself with the basics first.
Start off with some shorter sessions and then expand your workout as you become more confident and as your fitness, levels start to rise.
8. Prepare For Your New Routine
Make sure that you make yourself available to workout and have a rough plan of how you would like your workout to go. You need to come up with some realistic goals too, so if you want to have 6-pack abs, aim to achieve some muscle definition within 6 months or if you would like to lose 20 pounds, make sure that the timeframe that you set yourself is achievable. If you don’t know what your targets are, no personal trainer will be able to help you and that’s the recipe for failure.
9. Remember Cardio
So you want to get 6-pack abs, bulging biceps, and strong legs? You can’t get those things by just lifting weights. You must remember that while you’re working out, you should fit in a good amount of cardio.
If you’re already carrying excess weight, you need to make sure that you burn off the fat by doing frequent cardio and eventually the muscle will start to show through.
10. Use A Visual Inspiration
It is very helpful to have a visual inspiration to keep you motivated to lose weight. Try performing a Google image search to find photos of people who have a body shape and size similar to your own ideals.
Print out the image or images and display these where you will see them all the time, for example near your work desk, on your car dashboard or on the fridge. Save it as your screen on your phone and desktop. This will give you a visual goal that will stay in your sight and keep you motivated every single day!
Are you preparing to begin a healthy lifestyle? Share what struggles you’ve had in the past to stick with it and let me know if these fitness tips for beginners helped to motivate you! I am embarking on my own journey for the 58387th time so know that you’re not alone and that failure is never permanent, it’s just a change of course towards the end goal.
If you want to read about my previous weight loss journey, find it here. I lost over 30lbs incorporating green smoothies into my daily diet!
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Great post, everything you list here is 100% true! The only way to make exercise a habit is to make a firm, non-negotiable decision that it’s something you make time for. Cardio and HIIT have been life-savers for me as I spend 8+ hours a day in front of a computer!
For me, one of the motivating things that keeps me consistent is the “instant-gratification” aspects of exercise – that feeling of accomplishment when you’ve gone already gone for a 10 mile bike ride by 7am, and the extra energy you get for the whole day!
yes that feeling of accomplishment is an amazing bonus! Thanks for the cosign 🙂
Awesome tips! I’m so glad you bring up the importance of eating well. It plays such an invaluable role in your wellness and fitness.
And I adore that you mention how it important it is to not compare yourself to others too ♡. We are beautiful and unique. Comparison is truly the thief of joy!
Yes so true! Thanks for stopping by Sara
This is packed with some great tips! As a plant-based eater, I LOVED your point about eating more vegetables! It’s amazing how versatile vegetables are. I absolutely love that they can be seasoned with almost any seasoning– even steak seasoning and grill.
Very true im trying to get them more in my diet
Very good tips! I actually started walking 20 minutes almost every morning. I feel my energy level rising.
such a quick and easy way to get more activity in each day
yayyy!! I have got my summer healthy lifestyle motivation. Thank you for boosting me up. All tips are amazing. I have written a post on self care to develop a healthy lifestyle: http://kiyashmi.com/5-useful-ways-practice-self-care-healthy-life/. I enjoyed reading this post 🙂
Great i’m going to check out your post!
loved the blog. i started losing weight by changing my diet and doing alot of thing as mentioned in practice. there are alot of new information i have never heard of and thats good to know especially sleep. thanks for sharing and looking to read some more sooner.
Thanks for stopping by Marcel cheers on your success so far
Great tips here! I am proud to say that I actually do some of these, but I still have lots of work to do. I could definitely do better with my sleep schedule, and I could update my meal planning too. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Heather, meal planning slips me far too often too
Wow, great article! Keep going!!