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Everyone knows that exercise is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Being physically active offers many benefits, improving your physical health, mental wellbeing, and your physique. But, sometimes, exercising can be a struggle. Finding the motivation to get active when you feel stressed with other things on your mind or after a long day at work can be especially challenging. There are many barriers to overcome when making exercise a part of your daily routine. From a lack of time, feeling too tired, and simply not wanting to get up off the couch and do it, at times, exercising can be tough. However, when you start moving and hit your stride, exercising can feel fantastic.
Being active encourages the release of the feel-good hormones known as endorphins, which can instantly make you feel better. Despite the endorphins making you feel great, if your stamina is low, you will struggle to maintain your performance and reach your fitness goals. Pushing yourself a bit harder and beating your personal best feels amazing, but it does take stamina. Increasing your stamina can give your exercise performance a significant boost, helping you perform better than ever. If you are keen to increase your stamina, the following ideas will provide you with some inspiration:
Fuel Your Body
While pushing yourself forward and increasing your stamina may seem like a case of mind over matter, this is not strictly the case. How you fuel your body can make a significant difference to your physical performance and provide you with the energy you need to go further than ever before.
Nutrition directly impacts how your body uses energy and recovers after a workout. Protein can play a crucial role in fueling your workouts and help to increase your stamina by aiding the repair and building of muscle. Using a protein powder, such as Juice Plus, can be an excellent way to easily add protein to your diet to fuel your workouts. If you are trying to build your stamina levels to take part in endurance sports, increasing your protein levels could be especially helpful. Protein could help to aid your muscle repair, allowing you to recover from exercise faster and potentially increasing your ability to train for longer.
Exercise Regularly
Regular exercise should be a part of everyone’s weekly routine. The CDC recommends that adults perform 150 minutes of physical activity weekly and muscle-strengthening activity at least two days per week. Exercising regularly is not just crucial for your general health; it is also an excellent way to boost your stamina.
Making sure that you train regularly and consistently is essential when you are trying to build your stamina. You can boost your stamina by increasing your physical strength and upping your cardio stamina. High-intensity interval training (HIIT), including squats, push-ups, and situps, can help increase both strength and cardio stamina. Mixing your workouts up and ensuring that while you train consistently, the content of your workouts varies is especially helpful for stamina building. This is because your workout may no longer feel challenging if your body has grown used to it. Plus, mixing up your workouts will keep them feeling fresh and enjoyable, meaning it’s less likely you will get bored and try to skip training.
Get a Workout Buddy
Do you have a gym buddy? If you find that your motivation to exercise is low and a lack of stamina is forcing you to cut your workouts short, a gym buddy may help to resolve this situation. Pairing up with a workout buddy is a helpful way to increase your motivation and make you more likely to commit to your gym session. Arranging to meet with a friend to exercise means you must show up; otherwise, you will let them down. But as well as ensuring that you don’t hit snooze and skip your 6 am gym wakeup call, having a workout buddy can also increase your stamina. Working out with a friend may encourage you to train more frequently, as it becomes as much a social event as the opportunity to get fitter. An increase in training sessions can help improve your stamina on its own. However, if your training partner is a little bit fitter than you are, you should find that this naturally encourages you to up your efforts and increase your own pace to match theirs. The incentive of keeping up with your training buddy, combined with their encouragement, should help you notice an increase in your stamina pretty quickly.