We had the opportunity to chat with Sarah Van Noort, a Professional Training Coach at IF North Vancouver to learn more about health and wellness in the fitness world. She couldn’t emphasize enough on how internal health affects our daily fitness performance.
Let’s learn more on how to build and maintain strong internal health and how it can help you achieve your goals!
Q: What are some tips and tricks to add to your daily routine to ensure you’re staying healthy?
A: Always watching what you’re eating closely, drinking water all day every day, and cutting back on unnecessary sugars, are definitely positive contributors to add to your daily routine.
Eating healthy proteins and getting your heart rate up at least once a day are both important to ensure your immune system stays strong to fight off colds and flus.
You also want to make sure you’re constantly washing your hands! (all the time!)
Q: How important is exercise in preventing yourself from getting sick?
A: A well-balanced lifestyle of both exercise and rest will definitely contribute to a strong immune system. Exercise helps your immune system to become less feeble and more durable, it aids in keeping the body resilient. All of this is, of course is dependent on the type of training you’re doing, you can deplete the immune system if you’re over working. Essentially, keeping your heart rate up assists your body in creating a healthy blood flow, and this definitely can support you preventing sickness.
Q: Should you exercise when you are sick? Sweat it out or rest up?
A: Good question! Scientifically I can’t speak to this as I do not know the exact science or specific facts around this. However, for myself, I would not attempt to do an intense or incredibly hard work out when I’m sick, but keeping the blood pumping and circulating helps to fight sickness. This is also very subjective and individualistic depending on your body, it’s mostly determined by what your immune system wants to do. Finding the balance in this case is a good idea, light exercise like walking may help your body earn rest and rest is always key to getting better! But I would say it’s always case by case.
Q: How do you ease yourself back into working out after you’ve been hit the seasonal cold/flu?
A: Once you’ve been hit with the seasonal cold of flu, your immune system is depleted, you feel weaker and your body does not have the same stamina it does when you are perfectly healthy.
Try to work on light cardio before hitting those hard intervals when getting back in to working out, lift lighter weights so you don’t strain your muscles or pull something, definitely scale back on those reps at first.
Easy bike rides, stretching, and light jogs, are all ways of getting the body properly prepared and situated when getting back into your fitness routine, before really hitting it hard again.
The most important thing we all need to keep in mind is “a well-balanced lifestyle”, a regular daily exercise can strengthen your immune system and prevent you from getting sick. Let Innovative Fitness take care of both your internal and physical health!
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