4 places to start
“Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.” Eckhart Tolle
In this blog I will discuss the importance of building health and fitness from the inside out and highlight four key areas to invest your energy in if you want to live a longer, healthier life.
1. Attitude and Mindset
Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
If your thoughts are becoming your habits, then analysing your lifestyle habits will reveal a lot about your thinking!
Becoming more aware of your thoughts can provide valuable information to help healthy living. Building a healthier lifestyle therefore needs to start with choosing healthier thinking.
I’ve found that keeping a journal helps to build a practice of gratitude, helps you stay true to your values,
and encourages you to live intentionally. Using affirmations and highlighting wins can also really help create a healthy mindset. Journals can also encourage us to think about how we can cultivate joy and meaning in our life.
Practices such as Qigong develop a sense of groundedness and calm and are a useful antidote for overthinking.
Listen to your feelings – they guide you
Your thoughts manifest as feelings, and it’s your feelings and emotions that give you feedback about what’s going on around you and how your body’s feeling about it.
Listening to your feelings is key as they communicate your needs and what’s important to you and drive you into action (or not). They even create connections to yourself and others, through empathy or compassion.
Prioritising times of peace and quite in your day is a great move to cut out the external noise and allow you to get int touch with how you feel.
2. Breathing
“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts”
It’s pretty obvious that breathing is pretty important; we can only live for three minutes without it! Breathing enables us to convert the food we eat into energy, acting like bellows stoking a fire. It miraculously ticks over in the background, responding to our internal and external inputs, delicately and cleverly influencing our biochemistry in an attempt to maintain equilibrium.
But, there’s more to your breath than just energy conversion. Below I’ve highlighted how your breath is key to your health and fitness:
Breathing can be used as a tool connecting mind and body
Your mind and breathing are synergistically intertwined – for example, chaotic thinking reflects as chaotic breathing, conversely, a calm mind fosters calm breathing.
Sometimes, ruminating thoughts can spiral out of control but simply drawing your attention to your breathing connects your body and mind: you’re now not your thoughts, you have a body. This simple awareness tool can have dramatic benefits to those who struggle with overthinking. Just 30 seconds of conscious breathing can calm your mind and your physiology.
Your diaphragm plays a vital role as a core stabiliser
When you breathe from your diaphragm, this dome-shaped muscle helps to decompress your spine acting as a a core stabiliser, which is important for good posture and a strong body. Sedentary lifestyles with a lot of sitting can lead to poor posture which inhibits your diaphragm functioning as it should. When functioning well, the action of your diaphragm pushes down onto your internal organs gently massaging and aiding the action of digestion.
3. Strengthen your deep abdominals before the outer
Most people have heard of the term ‘core stability’. It’s synonymous with your ‘abs’! There are many functions of the core, not to mention postural stability, dynamic movement, breathing and supporting your internal organs.
In reality, your abdominals go much deeper than what you can see in the mirror (literally). Due to social pressures it’s desirable to improve the aesthetics of your ‘abs’ – social media has no shortage of exercises showing you how to improve the appearance of your abs! But it’s important to strengthen your deep core muscles first.
When working with clients one of the first things I run through is a comprehensive core assessment to establish what is working, and what’s not.
There are two types of core muscles, the ‘inner unit’ and the ‘outer unit’. The role of the inner unit, which lie’s anatomically deeper in the body, is to stabilise your spine and pelvis, whilst the outer unit’s roll is to move your torso and limbs. A common mistake is for people to jump straight into working the outer unit and neglecting the inner unit leading to dysfunction and injury. At least in the initial stages of exercise, and particularly if you suffer from back pain, building stability of the deeper core muscles such as transverses abdominis, pelvic floor, diaphragm and multifidus gives you a solid platform to integrate functional movement.
4. Organ health
Ancient therapies such as Acupuncture and Qigong appreciate the link between the health of our organs and muscles. It’s well known that symptoms of a heart attack can manifest down the left arm and that women’s menstruation can lead to muscular back ache; this phenomena is a called a viscerosomatic reflex.
A common undetected example of a viscerosomatic reflex can be seen when the gut becomes inflamed leading to inhibition of the deep core muscles. This then creates destabilisation of the pelvis and back risking injury. As a Personal Trainer for over 25 years, I’ve seen many clients’ core muscles start to function better when you clean up their diet by eliminating processed foods and food types like gluten which lead to gut inflammation.
If you’re looking to improve your health and fitness then working from the inside out is a important place to start.
If you need a health expert to help you you get started get in touch today for a free 15 minute consultation.
