Healthy Cooking

Experts advise to break up the long-term fitness goals into shorter, smaller and more realistic ones in order to ensure success and to be able to stick to an exercise regime, many professional health instructors suggest making work-outs fun to do! Once you eliminate boredom from an exercise routine, such as only working out on a stationery bike or hitting the home-gym where you are faced with the treadmill and the same old environment by taking your workout out, you stand a better chance of sticking to the routine – thanks to the novelty factor as well as the freshness of the ideas as such.

Moreover, with increased health awareness and learning about the ill-effects of obesity, there is no dearth of the number of open-air fitness options that are increasingly being made available to singles or groups of people wanting to explore being outdoors – and benefit health-wise from it, too!

So, it’s a common sight today to find people engaged in sporty pursuits for a health purpose as well as one that combines a certain amount of communing with nature or socializing such as walking the dog or swimming in a community pool ensures they benefit from.

The advantages to taking your daily work-out outdoors are many: from needing little by way of expensive gym equipment (read nothing more than your own two feet or a pair of dumbbells, if you wish) to avoiding the sweaty crowds at the local gym, from no having to drive back and forth to a health spa to availing the benefits of fresh and pure oxygen, from ensuring your daily dose of vitamin D that is only available from sunlight to being free to exercise anytime of the day, anywhere – the benefits of outdoorsy workout are huge!

There are also many different types of activities one can pursue outdoors, some of which we list here for your benefit and healthful knowledge:

Apart from exercising your lungs and filling them with pure oxygen that an outdoor work-out in the early morning guarantees you, you also get to benefit from the added room and spaciousness of an outdoor environment where you can perform lunges to build leg, buttock and thigh muscles. You can team these with other forms of exercise that are restricted by limited space indoors, such as jogging and stretching.

Thus, when outdoors, you can accommodate various forms of energetic exercise to sweat more, weigh less and look great by combining different motions such as performing standing lunges, brisk walking and rear lunges besides elevated walking.

The benefits of performing push-ups for a toned upper body are many and these can best be realized when performed in a natural environment that does away with the need for investing in a bench-press machine or an expensive gym membership fee. Basic movements for a push up includes standard, wide and close gripping of surfaces that will help to stimulate shoulder, chest and triceps muscles and this can be achieved with simple elevation of the hands; more intense work-outs can be performed by elevating your feet.

If you feel up to it, try clapping between push-ups or even squatting on one leg then standing and trying a wider stance; do remember to repeat till you feel the legs experiencing the effects of your efforts.

Other great outdoor exercises include sit-ups, chin-ups (try a tree or playground), uphill running or even walking like a duck – and you will be on your way to good health, cost-effectively!