10 Tips To Maintain an Active Lifestyle

Maintaining an active lifestyle is vital to supporting your well-being. However, it can sometimes feel like a chore to drag yourself out of bed and into the gym. Luckily, hitting the track or grabbing weights aren’t the only ways to stay on top of your health. Follow these ten tips to maintain an active lifestyle even when you might not feel passionate about pursuing positive choices in your life.

Evaluate the Present 

Take stock of who you are and where you are in life right now. Include your active lifestyle as an essential part of who you are. Maintaining an active lifestyle might be easy for you, but make sure you plan for when life interferes.

Set Goals

As you age, your activity will change. If maintaining an active lifestyle is a core tenet of your being, you must research what that looks like at age 20, 30, 40, 50, etc. Mapping your future is especially important because people who live an active lifestyle are more likely to live longer than those who don’t, according to TIME magazine.

Journal Your Progress

One of the best ways to monitor your progress and make sure you’re staying as active as you think you are is to create a journal to track your activity. You can use your journal to celebrate victories and reframe your failures into learning opportunities.

Seek Balance, Not Perfection

As you review your journal entries, remember that you are human. Progress is a process. Sometimes you might have to take time off for temporary injury or illness, but taking note of those hiccups and how you incorporated active rest into your recovery could be worthwhile for future events.

Meet Nutritional Needs

A balanced life is one way to ensure that you aren’t putting too much of your time or effort into just one bucket. Balanced nutrition follows the same premise. While salads and leafy greens and a great way to get roughage, protein and complex carbs are essential ingredients that keep you energized for an active lifestyle. Vitamins, minerals, and brain health supplements can support a well-balanced diet. Taking care of your brain health can help you as you grow which is something worth looking into.

Make Sure To Move

Remember, some movement is better than none. Everyone is guilty of waking up and feeling the fuel tank flat empty from time to time. Even active rest is better than no movement, so take a walk around the block or stretch out the blues to get back on track for your day.

Get Appropriate Rest

Rest isn’t just sleeping. Take necessary time away from work, school, or any other responsibilities that take a lot of mental, physical, or emotional calories from you. To be your best self, you need to recharge. Sometimes recharging looks like a run in the park, but other times it looks like eight hours of sleep, 20 minutes of meditation, or half an hour alone in the bath.

Decrease Occasional Stress

Stress is inevitable. The way you deal with stress is key to your performance in daily life. Harvard Health reports that maintaining an active lifestyle is one effective strategy that people use to support reducing occasional stress. Other strategies to support reducing occasional stress include but are not limited to:

• Painting
• Playing music
• Gardening
• Cleaning
• Horseback riding
• Fishing
• Cooking
• Birdwatching

Build Support Networks

Accountability makes keeping up with your active lifestyle more manageable and more fun. As you meet more like-minded people and build a support network of enthusiastic people who enjoy the same lifestyle, it will be easier to find the time to stay active as life progresses.

Mix It Up

Routines make life easier and more manageable, but they can become tiresome. If you start to get bored, change up your regimen. Instead of biking to work, try running. If Saturday mornings are for yoga, trade it out for cardio, and switch it to Monday evening from time to time.

Maintaining an active lifestyle also means being ready and flexible for whatever life throws at you. The best way to maintain an active lifestyle is to continue to build the life you want and surround yourself with people who support your journey.