What is Health And Fitness?
I feel like too often, when health & fitness is mentioned, most people think of the gym or running or athletes but this isn’t health & fitness as a whole, it is just physical fitness, one aspect of health and fitness. When I mention health and fitness, I’m referring to the 6 aspects that compose it.
These aspects include:
- physical fitness (muscular strength, endurance, mobility…)
- mental & emotional health (maintaining a positive and stress free mental state)
- skill related fitness (balance, coordination)
- medical health (not being ill and free of disease)
- nutritional health (maintaining a healthy and balanced diet)
- social health (ability to interact with others)
Focusing on all aspects of health and fitness will ensure you can carry out your day to day duties unencumbered by stress, lack of energy both physically and mentally, bodily pain, etc…
Why I focused on developers When writing this post
This post can be applied to pretty much anyone in any field but I chose to narrow the focus of this post to developers as that is what I am and also because of how developers spend most of the time when working. As a developer, you pretty much spend most of your day behind a computer screen, sat down for around 7 - 8 hours.
This can have several affects on both mind and body like increased levels of stress, eye strain, lower back soreness/pain, issues with your wrist (the one you use your mouse with), etc..
Focusing on your health & fitness at least 2 hours a week can lead to significant improvements in both body & mind and can also lead to improvements in productivity within work.
What can you do today?
You don’t need to buy a gym membership to get your exercise in as your more likely to do too much too soon and then stop suddenly due to loss of motivation, lack of time, bouncing back to old habits, etc…
Instead you should focus on building small habits that make it easy to stay fit and healthy. Such habits can include drinking two to three litres of water a day by using a combination of a one litre bottle and an alarm set on your phone that helps to remind you to drink water, eating one fruit everyday, setting an alarm on your phone to remind you to stand for 5 mins or go for a short 10 min walk or replacing a heavily processed food item on your shopping with something less processed e.g a pack of chocolates for a pack of apples.
The above habits are easy to implement and track which makes it easy to remember and stay on top of them. Just think of something you could easily implement that could lead to improvements in your health & fitness and setup systems like the examples with the alarm to serve as a reminder that allow you to turn those implementations into habits you don’t have to think about after a while of doing them.