Health and Fitness Mistakes You Should Avoid

Leading a healthy lifestyle can have positive effects in your personal and professional lives. Often, our ideas and perceptions of “healthy” tend to be mistaken, leading to health problems and complications.

A healthy lifestyle is one that is balanced. Healthy shouldn’t mean that you deprive yourself of things that you enjoy doing–like every now and then indulging in chocolate or pizza or taking a day off to watch Netflix or read.

Here are five of the most common health and fitness mistakes you should avoid:

1- Not Sleeping Enough: Our bodies need rest. Whether you are a gym enthusiast or enjoy strolling during the day, your body, muscles, joints, and mind all need a break. Getting enough sleep is key in making sure you will perform your best in physical and mental activities.

2- Over or Under Eating: Our bodies need nourishment to recover and keep performing at optimal levels. Under or over eating can have negative consequences like weakened immune system, lack of energy, and weight gain. Make sure you are getting enough of the necessary nutrients to keep your body and mind going.

3- Being Afraid to Ask: If you’re uncertain about any health, food, or fitness issues don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t know how a machine works at the gym, ask! Otherwise you risk injuring yourself. The same goes around any other topic related to your health, there’s no shame in consulting an expert about what foods to eat and when, when to work out, when to rest, etc.

4- Lack of Discipline: If you start a program, make sure you stick to it, otherwise you won’t see the expected results. This goes both for active days as well as for rest days. Don’t try to over or under do it. This also goes for your diet program; respect your eating times and your portions. A cheat meal and a cheat day are far from the same thing. On a similar note, make sure you are not changing from program to program every other week or month; give your body enough time to experience the results before switching to a new program.

5- Not Having a Goal: Training or dieting for the sake of training or dieting is not good enough. You need to establish personal goals (i.e. to lose weight, gain weight, define muscles, tone, etc.). Having a goal will make it easier for you to focus on what you need to work on, it will help you be accountable, and it will help you in following and sticking to a program.

Work and life have become fully integrated, which is why leading a healthy lifestyle is key to professional success. Flexible workspaces such as Shift Workspaces have become a valuable tool in helping professionals blur the line between work and life.