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How Exercise Can Help Improve Anxiety & Depression

Mental health can often get overlooked in the fitness industry. We tend to focus on the physical benefits and the visual changes, but keeping our mental state in order is key to everyone’s overall health. 

Everyone will have their own personal journey with mental health throughout their lives and everyone will have their own way of both healing and managing their own minds. 

For many the gym is their escape, their chance to unwind, a way to channel those negative energies and thoughts into something positive, something productive. When your mind becomes cluttered, exercise can be the route to a still mind.

Whether it be a cardio workout to sweat out the stresses of the day or a weights session to pump out the day’s frustrations, the gym can be your place of solitude, the place to focus on yourself and your own goals.

You don’t have to be a fitness fanatic to reap the benefits. Research indicates that modest amounts of exercise can make a real difference. No matter your age or fitness level, you can learn to use exercise as a powerful tool to deal with mental health problems, improve your energy and outlook, and get more out of life.

 

Exercise & Depression

Exercise is a powerful depression fighter for several reasons. Most importantly, it promotes all kinds of changes in the brain, including neural growth, reduced inflammation, and new activity patterns that promote feelings of calm and well-being. It also releases endorphins, powerful chemicals in your brain that energize your spirits and make you feel good.

Finally, exercise can also serve as a distraction, allowing you to find some quiet time to break out of the cycle of negative thoughts that feed depression.

 

Exercise & Anxiety

Exercise is a natural and effective anti-anxiety treatment. It relieves tension and stress, boosts physical and mental energy, and enhances well-being through the release of endorphins. Anything that gets you moving can help, but you’ll get a bigger benefit if you pay attention instead of zoning out.

Try to notice the sensation of your feet hitting the ground, for example, or the rhythm of your breathing, or the feeling of the wind on your skin. By adding this mindfulness element—really focusing on your body and how it feels as you exercise—you’ll not only improve your physical condition faster, but you may also be able to interrupt the flow of constant worries running through your head.

How We Can Help

So if you’re looking for a positive outlet to life’s stresses and struggles, we at Results are here to help. It doesn’t matter if you are a complete beginner or not been to a gym in years, we include on-going exercise plan design within our memberships. We can create an exercise programme for you based on your personalised goals and run you through it in a 1-1 session. Contact us for more information and to get yourself booked in.

If you’re struggling with your mental health right now please know you’re not alone. Please visit www.mind.org.uk for help and support. 

Authors: Lawrence Robinson, Jeanne Segal, Ph.D., and Melinda Smith, M.A & sections/edits by Susie Dane.

Read the full unedited article here: 

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The 80/20 Rule

There are a lot of unhealthy relationships within the fitness society ranging from making poor food and exercise choices, to the other end of the spectrum with food and exercise obsessions. Both extremes are unhealthy; excessive exercise and food obsessions are not conducive to sustainable, long term results. They are generally not enjoyable and can make for a restrictive lifestyle that is difficult to maintain.

THE 80/20 LIFESTYLE

However, the 80/20 fitness principle that I like to follow for long term results is as follows; put in a top effort 80% of the time in order to obtain the health and fitness results you desire and for the remaining 20%, don’t worry about it – enjoy your life!

Maybe you think that by allowing yourself to relax for 20% of the time that you won’t achieve the results you’re after.  However, the opposite is in fact true and let me explain why;

First of all, 80% of the time is a very large proportion; For every ten meals that you eat, aim for eight of them to be as nourishing as possible. For the remaining 20% you can allow yourself to eat in a way that doesn’t exactly follow the health guidelines, but this 20% won’t stop you from being on track.

How can this be true? When you successfully change your lifestyle so that you eat healthily the majority of the time, you are not really going to be tempted to gorge yourself on an unhealthy fast food meal or eating a full bar of chocolate. Believe it or not, in time you won’t get cravings for these sorts of foods any more and even if you do, once you start eating them you’ll realise that they’re making you feel sick, or they just don’t taste like real food any more. If by chance you do go ahead and eat something like this, you’re likely to get a sore stomach or feel low on energy later in comparison to those good foods 80% of the time; then you’ll probably crave the delicious healthy food you’re used to eating!

However, if you are getting cravings to this degree & ‘binge eating’ on the regular, just keep working on healthy choices & eventually these unhealthy binges will become a thing of the past.

LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE

The 80/20 diet means that you won’t feel like you’re depriving yourself of things by saying, “I can never eat that”.  In small, infrequent amounts of more appealing options are not going to disrupt your goals. Instead,

‘it is the person who tells themselves they can’t have something that later feels deprived and binges in a way that will actually hinder their progress’.

Hooper, L. 2021. Ref; McGuiness, K. 2017.

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