Are you over just walking for exercise every day? Just because gyms are closed, it doesn’t mean that your exercise routine has to be boring! Vitruvian Health shares their quick lower body workout using just one piece of equipment: a resistance band!
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Tighten up your core with this resistance band workout!
Just because we’re locked down, it doesn’t mean you have to let your fitness go by the wayside. Vitruvian Health shares a two-step core workout that you can do from the comfort of your own home using just a resistance band!
How to start setting good habits
Karl from Vitruvian Health shares what he thinks is the best way to start setting good habits.
Setting a habit can be as easy as 1, 2, 3.
It’s just about working out what the 1,2,3 means. The way we look at it is: what is the one thing you can do today to have a domino effect on other areas of your life? For example, feeling tired could be a symptom of dehydration. Drink an extra litre of water for the next three days and see what happens! This could give you more energy to do more tasks at home or work – wherever you need!
Understand that whatever point you’re at now is a great place to start. In order to begin setting habits, you need to accept your state, but also analyse it fully. It’s important to understand that if we want to improve in whichever area of our lives, the most efficient, and easiest way to do so is by introducing new habits into our everyday life.
But how?
Start by asking yourself the question ‘What can I start doing today that contributes to reaching my goal in a certain period of time?’. This, more often than not, leads you to the right answer. One of the most common reasons for failure is the unreasonable need of over doing everything at once, as it leads to getting overwhelmed and then giving up. It’s all about the little steps taken consistently and therefore turned into our new habits.
When it comes to setting a habit, you need to understand that the process is very much so ‘trial and error’. Just because you were unable to stick with one habit, doesn’t mean you’ve failed! It most likely means you’ve over-complicated your changes, asking yourself to alter too many aspects of your life at once. It’s important to note, you can change your habit journey at any point of time, just make sure it works for you.
At Vitruvian Health, we do weekly reflections with our team via our check-in forms, to help one another with keeping ourselves accountable. This is translatable to your own team, or even on your own.
The question you should always ask yourself is, ‘How does introducing these small changes into my life work for me?’. An example we give to many of our clients is drinking 2-3L of water each day. This small change is not difficult to implement, but has serious benefits to the mood and wellbeing of the client.
If the client is able to stick with this goal, we advise them to keep doing it and slowly add another change (such as incorporating protein into each meal). If it didn’t, we find out why, simplify the goal and start implementing again.
At the end, hopefully you will learn more things about your body functions than previously to help you understand which habits serve you well and which don’t.
This article was provided by Vitruvian Health.
How to Effectively Target your Glutes
Karl from Vitruvian Health gives us a quick run down on how to best target the muscles in our glutes.
How can you target a muscle if you can’t actually feel it? That’s the problem many people have with targeting the glutes.
There are three main things to think about:
- The intention of the muscle;
- The mobility of the muscle;
- The stability of the muscle.
When you have tight muscles, work on improving your stability. This will aid the muscle’s mobility, improving its range of movement. In turn, this also provides a greater stretch in the muscle to increase its work.
In order to effectively target any muscle, we need to look at the movement point where we can get the greatest stretch and a peak contraction. For the glutes, we need to hit the muscle at two or three different angles.
We recommend activation exercises to target glutes which will create more awareness around the muscle itself. Activation exercises increase blood flow to your muscles, in turn improving flexibility and range of movement. A low level of applied resistance will also allow for greater muscle control. Examples of such activation exercises can be banded abductions, side clams and glute bridges (pictured below). These combined with some low cable attachment hip extensions or single leg aeroplanes (both of which improve stability) will provide greater control of the muscle and hence a greater contraction in the end result.
The main function of the gluteus maximus is to extend and laterally rotate the hip joint. Furthermore, the upper fibers can abduct (move away from the midline) the hip whereas the lower fibers can adduct (move towards the midline) the hip.
Today, we’ll talk about the exercises where the knees are pushed out and hips are extended.
Barbell hip extension
This is a great exercise for working from a flexed position into an extended position. It begins in a seated position, with your back against a bench and a barbell across your hips. The movement involves using your glutes to push the bar up towards the ceiling, focussing on working your glutes over your quads.
Barbell Romanian deadlift
This exercise works the other way around – from an extended position to flexed position, creating a stretch in your hamstrings and glutes. It begins by clutching the bar in a standing position, and pulling it up when you stand up straight.
The pairing of these two exercises creates a nice ‘A series’ of 6 – 8 reps, with a tempo of 4/2/1/0 (meaning 4 seconds up, 2 seconds of pause at the top, 1 second down and no pause at the bottom).
The ‘B series’ of this workout would work the hamstrings; they are the accessory to glutes so we need to train them as well. An example would be a dorsiflexed single leg lying hamstring curl (using the cable machine with feet flexed towards the front of your body) and a single leg rear foot elevated bulgarian split squat performing 10 – 12 reps.
As a finisher, your ‘C series’ can consist of glute focused back extension where working from the 45 degree angle.
This article was provided by Vitruvian Health.
Need help to ‘slow down’? Try meditating!
Karl from Vitruvian Health shares a method that will help you ‘slow down’ from daily life.
Take a moment today to ‘breathe in the serenity’. What does this mean? Take the time to meditate, reflecting on the day to come.
We know what you’re thinking: who has the time to meditate? The absence of meditation in one’s life is largely due to this mindset; that meditation is something one ‘can’t’ do. However, this is an excuse made by those who struggle to sit still long enough, or feel unable to block out intrusive thoughts whilst reflecting.
However, meditation provides benefits to not only your emotional well-being, but also your overall health, by bringing a sense of calm, peace and balance to your body. These effects are able to translate to life throughout the day, and can aid in managing symptoms of stress.
The great thing is, you don’t have to be Buddha to learn how to meditate. Quite simply, meditation can be done in any number of ways, not just the typical legs-crossed ‘ohm-ing’ way of meditating.
The aim of meditation is to create an opportunity to check in with yourself and observe how you are feeling. This means you can meditate whilst having your morning coffee sitting in a cafe, on your lunch break sitting under the Sun, in your office or even your living room – or even just lay in the grass looking up at the sky.
While doing this you can simply take a step back and listen to the sounds around you, your breath, and observe the thoughts running through your head.
After a few minutes of doing this, you may notice a slight shift in your mind – like things have slowed down a bit so that you can engage better with what is happening in the present rather than being caught up in your head.
Incorporating a few minutes of meditation into your daily routine can help greatly with improving your mental cognition and reducing brain fog, allowing you to be more productive and work and in your daily lifestyle.
This article was provided by Vitruvian Health.
4 White Devils
Karl from Vitruvian Health shares with us the ‘4 white devils’ to avoid in our diets.
With over 12 years of experience consulting and meeting with people in gyms, I have found a common subject that arises in conversation is food. Altering one’s diet, or more specifically, changing one’s consumption of the 4 ‘white devils’, can lead to a noticeable positive change in skin pigmentation, memory & cognitive function, whilst decreasing bloating levels and improving digestion.
But what ARE the 4 ‘white devils’? White flour, white sugar, table salt and commercial dairy comprise the 4 ‘white devils’. These refined and processed foods have been linked to causing huge fluctuations in blood sugar levels, and due to their highly processed nature, are stripped of many vitamins and minerals. It is for this reason they’re considered ‘devils’; they’re constantly over consumed, are heavily processed, and don’t offer much nutritional value in comparison to their counterparts.
The average person’s day may look like this:
- Wake up with a heavily milk-based coffee for breakfast, cereal with milk, or toast with margarine and vegemite or jam.
- Go to work, have another milk based coffee. Lunch is a takeaway meal from the food court; pasta, sandwich or salads with dressings.
- Back at the desk, have an afternoon snack. Biscuits or crackers with fruit, another milk-based coffee.
- At home, eat dinner; stir fry with noodles, pizza, or any other meal filled with white flour and table salt.
Now imagine eating like this for 7 days a week for the rest of your life. Pretty boring right? A lot of people tend to read information like this and think ‘Well, I don’t do that!’. However it is important to be honest, critically evaluating what you fuel your body with during the day. Do you really rotate your foods regularly, avoiding meals with hidden ‘devils’ inside? Even though you might have slight variations, a large portion of people still consume the 4 white devils (or at least some of them), as they are commonly found in the most convenient of meals.
Keep in mind, cutting out the ‘devils’ doesn’t mean that you have to cut out flavour from your diet. Consider the following alternatives:
White Flour
- Rice Flour
- Spelt Flour
- Coconut Flour
- Chickpea Flour
- Lentil Flour
White Sugar
- Brown sugar
- Stevia
- Honey
- Maple Syrup
- Coconut Sugar
Table Salt
- Celtic Salt
- Pink Himalayan Salt
- Black Salt
Commercial Dairy
- Plant Based Milk
- Organic Butter
Replace the 4 ‘white devils’ with the alternatives above, and see for yourself the difference in how you feel, move and function.
This article was provided by Vitruvian Health.