How To Be Fit & Healthy For Beginners [Podcast]

Welcome to the Kokoro Health and Fitness podcast where we cover topics about the mind body and spirit to help you become a happier healthier and ultimately the best version of you. I’m your host Joe Miller, owner of Kokoro health and fitness a small group and personal training studio located in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Today’s topic is how to be healthy and fit for beginners. This discussion is meant for those of you starting your health and fitness journey or someone looking for a different point of view. We will cover consistency, how to simplify your diet, your schedule, your workouts, and your decision-making process, how you train for health, and some of the benefits that you’re going to receive from being more fit and healthy.

*Disclaimer: This is for informational purposes only. Our goal is to help create a stronger healthier happier community of mentally, physically, and spiritually fit individuals by providing information for discussion that has helped us and many clients both personally and professionally. If you are in need of immediate help at this time, we recommend that you seek a medical professional and not just rely on advice from some random dude on the internet. Let’s move into today’s topics.

Consistency

Before starting any health and fitness program know that consistency is the key. I’m going to talk about five areas that if you’re consistent in will help you reach your goals.

1) Sleep

There are several studies out there showing the importance of sleep quality. Having a bedtime, having a strict wake-up time, and just setting your body up for success by knowing when you’re going to go to sleep and when you’re going to wake up is a good start.

Some things that you’ll benefit from getting higher quality sleep are:

• Better mood
• More energy
• Brain function
• General body function
• Recovery

2) Food Consumption

You did not gain all that extra body fat by eating a couple of meals. You were consistently over consuming and that’s what led to excess body fat storage. So if you want to reverse that you would simply eat in a caloric deficit regularly for an extended period of time. A quick example, if you eat 2 000 calories a day and you’re trying to lose body fat eating about 1800 to down all the way to 1500 calories a day is the ballpark range that you would need to consistently lose weight over time. This does not mean that you need to style yourself.

If the quality of your food is higher it has more nutrient density instead of caloric density then your body is going to be more satiated.

One of our clients on our six-week program lost 18 pounds in six weeks, so three pounds per week, she never felt over full and she never felt like she was completely lacking. That’s kind of the key sweet spot you want to find yourself in but she did that by increasing the quality of her food and cutting out all the junk.

3)  Water Consumption

Plain water is one of the six vital nutrients that your body needs to consume daily and without water, you die. Plain and simple, drink more water.

4) Workouts

At Kokoro, we recommend three days a week, full body workouts, in a circuit fashion. They’re time-saving, they’re very good at burning a lot of energy, and by 48 hours later you’re coming in and you’re recovered enough that you can do the workout and then be active on your days off.

If you’re trying to make a change in your body you need to bring the intensity. You can either:

• Increase the weight
• Increase the repetitions
• Decrease your rest times

All of those things will increase the intensity of your workouts. It doesn’t mean you go to the gym for hours but what it does mean is that hour that you are there needs to be very intense so you can work out as hard as you can and that will challenge your body enough to elicit a change.

Most people are on the right path. If you’re going to the gym that’s already a great start, if you’re active daily that’s a great start, but if you’re struggling with body fat loss then the problem could very well be you are just not working hard enough. Doesn’t sound very nice to say but in my experience as a trainer, most people are not pushing themselves as hard as they actually can because they don’t believe they can do it. You can, you just have to train a little bit smarter so you can train a little bit harder.

5) Laughter

The fifth area, that’s not really talked about a lot, is to increase your joy or your laughter. Laughter literally is medicine. Linked below I’ll have a really cool study that talks about the link between laughter and overall health. Misery loves company but laughter is infectious.

Let’s move on to the next topic.

Simplification

1) Diet and Food Consumption

This is the easiest place to start because you need to eat otherwise you’ll die.

First things first, cut out refined sugar.

Also, eat less processed food, one of the tips that I tell my clients is to flip the package over and look at the nutrition label. If you don’t know what it says, don’t eat it, that is the simplest place to start.

Next, portion control. We use hand measurements in here, I don’t make my clients count calories because it’s already stressful enough trying to make a big change. We use our palms, so for those listening if you have your palm all the way around at about an inch thick that’s a serving of protein, if you cup your hands that would be your serving of carbohydrates, the size of your thumb is your tablespoon ish or a serving of oil, which is about 120 calories by the way, and then a fist clenched would be your serving of your fibrous green so spinach arugula things like that. Those are the measurements that I have people use and it works really well.

Then as far as food goes you need to understand there are only six nutrients your body actually needs: proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, and surprise-suprise water. That’s it. Just understand your meal should consist of a protein, a carb, a fat, with minerals and vitamins, and then drink water. You will get all that by eating whole foods.

Now there are a plethora of other diets out there and we could dive into that for hours and hours and hours but this, once again, is simplifying.

The last thing for diet is you want to focus on food quality. One simple way to do that is to eat local food, so eat the produce that’s grown locally and then eat the food that’s in season. Those are the two easiest ways to do it. Then of course, if you have organic, that’s great too. As far as your meat consumption, the wilder it, is the better it is. So if it comes from a meat factory it’s just not going to be as good. Say you go to a butcher shop and they have a direct source from a cattle farm and those cows are out there roaming free and you know living life how they want to live, those are going to be better meat products for you. Whereas that pink paste slime that you get at McDonald’s that they call “meat”, that’s not real meat. That’s the leftovers that they grind up into this little nasty patty. That’s just terrible for you.

2) Sleep Schedule

You want to focus on getting up at the same time every day. There are several new studies out, showing that to be more beneficial than just going to bed at the same time every night, for your overall health and longevity. Then once you pick your sleep schedule, go ahead and stick with it.

At least stick with it for six weeks to three months to give your body time to adapt and to see how it’s actually doing for you. Constantly fluctuating does not give your body enough time to adapt so you can see the actual results from the efforts you’re putting in. So you want to stay consistent for quite a while.

If you habit stack, this is going to create better efficiency for you as well. If you know every night like “okay, before I go to bed I’m going to read for 30 minutes”, you know, that every time you pick up that book before bed, you’re training your body and mind to know that 30 minutes later I’m going to sleep.

Staying off your phone is very essential, being distracted by social media, you know, watching movies and all that… Try to not do that as much as you can before bed. That’s a lot of sensory input and the less sensory input before bed and the more you can calm down the better you’re going to sleep.

3) Workouts

There are several training types out there bodybuilding, power lifting, CrossFit, functional training, circuit training, HIIT training… you could say all the names and if you don’t understand what they mean it just gets confusing. Simplification is better. So pick a style that you’re interested in based on the results that you want to see.

If you want to grow muscle and have hypertrophy which is the growth of muscle, then working out like a bodybuilder might be something that you enjoy. Maybe you want to compete and you want to go as fast and push it as much weight as you can as fast as you can against other people then CrossFit would be a good thing for you. Or if you want to pick up really heavy weight and throw it on the ground with a bunch of chalk, powerlifting is your game. It’s possible you’re just looking to improve at life and have your overall quality of life increase by being more strong, mobile, stable, and having the ability to do pretty much whatever you want when you want to do it physically, then you’re going to want to choose something like full body circuit training. That’s going to help enhance all the other areas in life.

Here at Kokoro, we train a lot of people from all walks of life. Then as they train here I make micro-adjustments to their workouts so they can get the maximum benefit for their lifestyle. It just depends on what your goals are but if your goal is just to kind of be better at life, not too concerned about big muscles, not concerned about competing, then just sticking with full body circuit training three days a week that’s going to get you where you want to go.

A quick sample of how you might want to lay out your workouts is: Push – Pull – Legs – Core – Cardio and then optional finishers like for the pretty muscles. If you want to grow your arms, you know, do more curls and things like that.

• Do some dynamic stretches to warm up
• Four to five rounds of the push-pull legs core cardio with a 90 to 120 second rest in between
• Stretch for about 10 minutes

The format we follow in here is pretty similar to that. We take about 10 minutes to do our warm-up, about 30 minutes to do the workout, and another 10 minutes to do our cool down… Under an hour.

You do have the time if you choose to make the time. If that means getting more strict on your schedule that’s just what it is. If you have goals you got to do something to actually make it happen.

4) Decision-Making Process

Eliminate any unnecessary decisions. I’ve had clients in the past that were hemming and hawing over what outfit they wanted to wear to the gym. The only person that cares is you. The trainer only wants you to show up so they can help you and then you can get the benefit. Laying out your clothes ahead of time and not thinking about that when you wake up. is one last decision.

Prepping your food. Worrying about what you’re going to cook is a pain in the butt. Half the time you worry about it and then you make the quick decision. If you prepare your food ahead of time, for say three to four days, then you don’t have to worry about it. You know what you’re gonna eat and if you get bored with it you know that it’s going to end and then you can make something else.

Pre-planning your workouts. So many people go to the gym for years and they look absolutely the same. The reason is they don’t plan anything. They don’t have the intensity because they don’t know what they’re doing. They just walk in “Ahhh, I think I’ll do this today and this is good” and then the common excuse is, “well, man, I work out all the time that should be better than this”. Like, you should be but you’re not trying hard enough and by trying hard enough I mean you walk in with no plan and no consistency and you expect results. It doesn’t work that way.

What you need to do is plan out your workouts and it doesn’t have to be overbearing. Saying push pull legs core cardio, you could pick when you show up: What you want to push, what you want to pull, what you want to do for legs, what core, and what cardio you’re doing you could pick on the fly. Better yet, write those down, this way it’s already done, you know what you have to do. You know your break periods, you can time that. Then you’re time efficient, you have your intensity up, and it’s less decisions that you have to make.

Then the last thing for your decision-making process is to pick a plan and stay stick to the plan for six weeks to three months. If you pick a training style, say bodybuilding, just do that for three full months no matter how much you enjoy it or don’t enjoy it just stick with it and see how it changes your body. After three months if you don’t like it move on to something else and then do that diligently for three months.

Without time and consistency, you’re not going to see change. So if you’re doing one thing for two weeks and switching to another thing and then switching to another thing and your intensity is all over the place it gets very scattered… well your body’s not going to adapt to anything because it doesn’t know what the hell you’re doing. Pick something, stick with it.

For a quick recap: simplify your diets, simplify your schedules, simplify your workouts, and simplify your decision-making process.

Training For Health

Just training in the gym is not really good enough if you want to be healthier for longer. You need to create a lifestyle that facilitates health and fitness.

Be active daily for an hour. That could mean taking your dogs for a walk, going outside doing a micro workout, like maybe a little bit more intense session of yoga or just a very active stretching routine. Do something every day for one hour. Quite literally motion is lotion, so if you stop using your body it will stop working for you.

You want to be training for strength. Muscles support your joints so if you have very poor muscle structure then you’re probably going to have pretty crappy joints. You strengthen your muscles your whole body gets better. Having strong muscles also helps brain function, also losing weight muscles use more energy stored excess fat doesn’t do anything but a muscle needs energy to survive.

Next, you want to stay limber. Yoga, daily stretching, picking exercises that allow for a lot of mobility, literally anything just make sure your body can move. That’s going to increase your blood flow, which is going to increase your nutrient delivery, which means your overall health is going to increase.

Additionally, you’ll want to eliminate excess body fat. There are literally thousands of studies that tell you excess midsection body fat is pretty detrimental to your overall health. You do not need to be super leaned and ripped and have apps popping all day but what you do need to be is in a healthy body fat range.

For men anywhere from like 14% – 18%, that’s groovy, that is a great place to be. Women all the way up to like 23% – 24% body fat, good to go.

You do not need to be ripped to be healthy. There are plenty of people that have very low body fat that are extremely unhealthy and then there are people that are at the higher end of the healthy body fat range that don’t look like they’re super healthy but they’re extremely healthy. Keep that in mind, looks are not always what they appear to be… but in general lowering the midsection body fat is going to correlate directly to your health, in a positive way.

Last thing I’m going to talk about is some of the benefits of being healthy and fit. These are ones that I have personally experienced, I have yo-yo’d. I started off as a teen very fit, going up and through the military fit fit fit, and then all the drinking started catching up and it started plummeting. Then I found myself last year in a place I really didn’t want to be in. I was very unhappy with how I looked, how I felt, my lack of energy, my poor sleep patterns… pretty much everything was pretty bad including my blood pressure. I took my health and fitness seriously and here are some of the benefits that I received that I know will help you.

• Lower blood pressure. It’s amazing what happens when your blood pressure lowers. With high blood pressure, it can increase anxiety, it can increase the ringing in the ears, you’ll have less energy, and obviously, your body’s working at a higher capacity but not in a good way, so lowering that blood pressure is a very good thing.
• Better mood.
• Better hormone regulation when you are living a healthy and fit lifestyle.
• Better sleep as well which is a caveat to getting healthy and fit is increasing your sleep quality.
• Better sex, boys, blood flow man… you know what I’m talking about.
• Increase in overall quality of life. Say you have that fit friend, and you’re like “man they invited me out and I really want to go but I can’t do it”. Well, why not, look at your life and decide what made you get to that point and then make a positive change? Being healthy and fit now you can be that friend and say “hey man you want to go on this random hike?” like “yeah totally!” or “hey, can you help me lift this?” “yup!” Something as simple as that will increase your quality of life because it makes more things in life available to you and the more things that are available to you the less confined you feel and the more freedom you’ll have.
• Daily tasks will become easier. What I mean by that is your groceries, picking those up, they’re going to feel lighter, going on that long walk is going to feel good, if you have kids and they run and jump and want to be thrown and play and do all these fun things that will be physically easier to do.
• Literally, everything in life gets better if you get healthier and more fit.

Before we go I have linked a Sleep Quality Quantity and Consistency article down below, Why Water Is Important, and Laughter. Those are just a few links if you want to dabble into those, if not, that’s great. Thank you for joining me on the topic of how to be healthy and fit for beginners. If you found value in this information please give us a like subscribe and share this with a friend who might benefit from this information as well.

If you’re local to the Atlantic Beach Florida area and you want to make positive changes to your life in a small group or personal training capacity go ahead and check out our website where you can sign up for classes Monday through Saturday in a small group or personal training setting. We hope you all have a great day!

Remember that happiness is a state of mind.

This discussion is meant for beginners on their Health & Fitness Journey or someone looking for a different point of view. We will cover how to be fit and healthy via consistency, how to simplify your diet, schedule, workouts, and decision-making process, how to train for health, and lastly, some of the major benefits of being fit and healthy.

Social Links

Article Links

Sleep Quality, Quantity, and Consistency https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6773696/

Why Water is Important https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908954/

Laughter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125057/

This channel is for informational purposes only. Our goal is to help create a stronger, healthier, happier community of mentally, physically, and spiritually fit individuals by providing information for discussion that has helped us, and many clients, both personally and professionally. If you are in need of help at this time we recommend that you seek a medical professional and not just rely on advice from some random people on the internet.