exercise - Life In Balance | Writing and 1:1 Coaching

Exercising For Maximum Energy

by Liz B | Oct 1, 2021 | Health, Physical Fitness

There are two main types of exercise. Aerobic and Anaerobic exercise. Let’s start with the first one.

Aerobic literally means with oxygen. Aerobic exercise has an important distinction; it burns fat as its main fuel. Can anyone find a use for this? Anaerobic means without oxygen. Anaerobic burns sugar as its main fuel.

Despite popular myth, exercise doesn’t have to be drastic to provide massive physiological benefits. Even light exercise will burn fat. Light exercise clears out lactic acid (a waste product in the body) and stimulates cells to regenerate.

To ensure you’re exercising aerobically (burning fat) rather than exercising anaerobically, it’s important to ensure you do several things as you exercise. The most important is to breathe deeply as you exercise. Breathe in deeply into your stomach through your nose, hold it and then exhale hard through your mouth.

Secondly, make sure that you exercise at a level that’s comfortable. Exercise at a level of 7/10. You should still be able to carry on a conversation while you exercise. Do this for at least 45 minutes a day and notice your energy explode.

Do you think you don’t have time to do this? There is always time. Use some of the time you would have spent sleeping to replenish your body. I guarantee that you’ll need less sleep. Or, use the time in your lunch break to exercise. The increase in productivity will have you more on the ball, and save you time through the dramatic increase in productivity.

See, with the increased oxygen from aerobic exercise your brain speed and efficiency increases. Ride a bike, walk, swim or play sport. Rebounding (or cellularise as it’s now known) is one of the best forms of aerobic exercise around. If you have access to a rebounder, use it.

Use any break you have whilst working to engage in some form of movement and deep breathing.

Exercise also strongly benefits the heart. It literally makes it a larger and stronger organ. Deep breathing makes the lungs stronger and larger. Research is now linking exercise to helping benefit and prevent almost every type of disease or ailment. Movement of any joints promotes blood flow and creates energy. Sitting down all day actually robs the body of energy. If you sit down all day, it’s absolutely vital that you promote blood flow, circulation, energy, brain flow and the strength of your heart.

Therapies for Anxiety

by Liz B | Oct 23, 2013 | Anxiety, Mental Health

I can speak first-hand about experiences with anxiety, being someone who has an anxiety disorder as long as I can remember and experimenting with different means of dealing with it. I would definitely recommend to anybody experiencing consistent anxiety to try daily exercise first before trying medication. I was on the treadmill today and realizing what an amazing therapy consistent exercise is, especially for stress, anxiety and depression. I think for it to be optimally effective, you’d want to do fairly intensive exercise (at least so you’re breaking a pretty good sweat) 4-5 times per week, consistently. I find it’s the act of really committing yourself to it fully that helps the most.

Another really important therapy in dealing with anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the consistent practice of analyzing what’s going on in your mind and re-programming the dysfunctional and unhealthy thought patterns into healthy ones. The reason I think this is so important (aside from the obvious) is that it teaches us to pay closer attention to what’s going on in our minds and how our thoughts so easily spiral without us noticing it that stir up unnecessary emotion in us and drain our energy in a matter of seconds. By getting in the habit of paying attention to these things, we can learn to take better control of them and reduce a lot of emotional distress.
There are cognitive behavioral therapy workbooks you can just buy online and work through and I think they are really worth the time — even if you don’t have bad anxiety and just want to practice working on being aware of and work on analyzing your thought patterns. After all, everyone has detrimental thought patterns now and then.

Taking anti-depressants for anxiety CAN be a life saver and really help you focus on keeping your thoughts positive by taking the edge off of the anxiety (I would know, having been on prozac for 8 years), but the problem is it’s easy to become psychologically dependent on these drugs as your only means of dealing with the anxiety, and who really knows exactly how they are affecting your brain.