Episode 37: Not Ready to Join a Gym? Build These Healthy Habits!
Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, I'm sharing tips for how to improve your health and get in shape without even stepping foot in the gym.
Living a fit lifestyle is all about building healthy habits, one by one into your life. Start with simple, manageable habits that are easy to add, like drinking more water to ensure proper hydration, using a journal or app to become more aware of your eating habits, or increasing your daily activity by setting step or movement goals. If you want to start working out at home, focus on building core strength and doing stretches to improve your posture and flexibility.
These foundational habits will make it easier to transition to more structured workouts and dietary plans in the future.
For additional support, consider joining the Gains Club membership on my website! I post new content every week for improving your health and fitness--including meal plans, workout routines, fat loss tips, recipes, and more. Check out jaydigains.com to sign up.
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Jayd Harrison (00:00):
If you want to start improving your health, if you want to start getting in shape, but you're not quite ready to go to the gym, or if you're feeling overwhelmed and you just want somewhere easy to start, those are the easy things that you can start practicing. Now, it can be really overwhelming looking at someone who has been working out for a really long time or who has been living a healthy lifestyle for a long time, and there's so many little bits and pieces, but you have to remember that people who've been doing it for decades like me, we have had decades to add and refine our habits. It's healthy habits that are going to carry you. Everybody has to start somewhere. So if you are interested in getting fit, getting in shape, getting healthy, however it is that you word it, but you're not ready to do all the things, what I would recommend is start small and build easy to get into habits into your life first.
(01:14)
Because the thing is those little habits will carry momentum and they will help you to add in the other pieces later in a way that's much easier and easier on your body. Frankly, easy things that you can start to build into your life to help you to get into shape before you ever step into the gym would be things like one, start drinking more water. Tons of people are chronically dehydrated if you drink a lot of soda, if you drink a lot of coffee or some other type of beverage and you don't drink a lot of water. And when you go to the bathroom, look at the color of your pee, which I know that sounds gross, but it really is a good indicator of your hydration levels. Ideally, what you want to see, the color that indicates good hydration is like a light, like a diluted lemonade type color clear with a little bit of color is pretty good.(02:14)
If your urine is really dark, then that's a good sign that you're not hydrated enough. So setting a goal for yourself to drink more water is a good place to start. That's an easy thing. Doesn't really require a whole lot of changing up your routine or your schedule. It really can just be as simple as getting a water bottle for yourself, filling it up at the beginning of the day and carry it around with you. Get into the habit of carrying some water with you everywhere you go or to work or whatnot. And then if you need to, if you're like you carry it with you but you're not actually drinking it, then start to set a little timer on your watch or a reminder on your phone. There's apps that send you reminders of to hydrate, so set it as a reminder if you need to or get a journal.(03:06)
A lot of people find it super, super helpful to use a journal for tracking when they're trying to add new habits into their life. Writing it down and committing to reminding yourself every day today, I'm going to drink X amount of water, and if you give me a number, right? Give me a number lady. Tell me how much a good standard rule of thumb is. Just say, eight ounces of glasses of water a day. That's 64 ounces. Am I right? Is that the right math? 64, 64 ounces of water. So either you drink eight glasses or you get a big water bottle and you just drink through it over the course of the day. They even make water bottles that have little notches on the side that tell you you want the water level to be here at 3:00 PM and here at 5:00 PM. So it's kind of like is a visual trigger.(03:58)
Use whatever habit triggers you need to kind of start building the habit because it's not just about drinking more water, getting active, exercising, eating more vegetables. You also have to learn the habit of learning new habits. You have to kind of get into a system that works for you and your brain for how to add something new to your routine. And there's lots of different habit trackers out there and journals and apps and strategies. You got to find something that works for you and keep it very simple. And also in the beginning, you want to pick your easy to master habits first. It's just like in a video game. In a video game, when you start a new game, they start you with very, very simple tasks. You're level one and they're slowly teaching you how to play the game. They're slowly teaching you the logic system.(04:55)
And then later when you get into the mid game and then the end game, you're like, it's easy for you to pick up new skills because you understand how the game works. So at the same time that you're trying to build healthy habits into your life, get really good at figuring out what works for you and your body when you want to add a new habit to your life. For me personally, I find manually writing shit down very, very helpful. I have a journal that allows me to block my time, like an appointments. I use an appointments book that's also a journal so that I can see what I'm doing every hour of the day throughout the week. And that helps me to, and then I also, if I have something that I'm adding, like this week, I'm going to make sure that I'm posting to my membership site what specifically I want to post.(05:45)
So I put a little reminder at the top of the day for each day, and I can remember, okay, when I get in front of my computer, this is the first thing I need to get done. So writing things down works really well for me. And then if this doesn't work, then I get more aggressive and I start setting timers on my phone, recurring daily timers for what time I want to do the new thing. And I do that until it becomes second nature. And that's the goal is when you're adding new habits, you want to get to the point where it's second nature. You don't have to write it down anymore. You don't have to have the reminders. It's just part of your routine. And once it's part of your routine, then it's time to add in a new habit, right? So one habit at a time.(06:28)
So drinking water is a really good one to start with. Another good one to start with. Before you ever step foot in the gym, start to become aware of what you're eating even before you change what you're eating. Start to practice awareness of what you're eating, practice awareness of what you're putting on your plate or what you're ordering by tracking what you eat using food journal or using a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal or a macros counting app. There's a lot of different apps out there. Find one that works for you and just start to take note of what your eating habits are because the habit of tracking what you eat is a habit that will allow you to make changes later on that you need to make. So before you make any changes, become aware of what you're eating first, track it. Just get in the practice of tracking it.(07:23)
You may find that tracking what you eat and stopping and being reflective of what you're putting on your plate or what you're ordering might actually facilitate you making better choices because you're having to think about it and you also know that you're going to have to write it down. So a lot of people find that they're able to actually make better, start eating better and make better food choices just through the act of tracking, even if they don't have an actual goal in mind that they're pursuing with their tracking before they even have a calorie goal or a protein goal. Just tracking alone a lot of can be very helpful. And then again, it is a habit that you're going to build later, build on later when you do set goals when you eat for a specific amount of calories and that kind of thing.(08:13)
So those two things are super helpful. And then number three, before you ever step in the gym, a thing that you can start to do to improve your health is to just build activity into your life. Just get moving more and more. Think about ways that you can move more. We're a sitting culture, right? We spend hours and hours and hours a day seated doing work and then watching Netflix or playing video games. So try to look for ways that you can spend less time sitting still and more time moving. Set a rule for yourself or a goal for yourself every day. A daily movement goal that can be a certain number of steps, like figure out how many steps you're walking. Now, your smartphone a lot of times will automatically track your steps. If you have your smartphone on you most of the day, it will track your steps.(09:11)
But if you wear a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or something else, or even an old school pedometer, figure out how many steps you're taking a day. If you're walking 3000 to 4,000 steps a day, that's kind of like a bare minimum for just baseline activity. So take, if you're not getting 3000 to 4,000 steps a day, I would set a goal of trying to get 3000 to 4,000 steps a day. Progress it up gradually. If you are already averaging 3000 to 4,000 steps a day, then set a new goal for yourself. Try to get 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 all the way up to, you could go all the way up to 10,000, but 10,000 is kind of an arbitrary number. I know a lot of people throw that out as like, you should be getting 10,000 steps a day. No, you shouldn't. That's an arbitrary number.(09:58)
It was made up for marketing, right? Just figure out what 3000 to 4,000 is the minimum. I like to shoot for 6,000 to 7,000 personally. So you could do a steps goal. You could also just set a minutes goal. You want to get up and moving a total by the end of the week, 150 minutes, and you can break that up into 30 minutes five times a week. Or if you want to go daily, that would be, what, 18 minutes or something like that. So set a daily movement goal for yourself. That's another thing that you can do to help your body to get healthier and to improve your heart health, your cardio health in particular without ever stepping foot in the gym and having to worry about, oh, what should I do for my workouts? I have been working my butt off over the last year because I have been developing a membership called the Gaines Club, and it is on my website, and this is me officially launching it.(10:58)
So on my membership site, on my website, I have an area where I post every week a new meal plan that you can follow if you are not sure how to eat healthy and you need a place to start. I get a new meal plan with new recipes every week as well as every month I'm posting workouts of the month that give you something that you can follow for when you go to the gym or if you're working out at home. I also have weekly post training tips, nutrition tips, recipes, fat loss tips. So that is all now live on my website and I'm really excited to share it with you guys. You can go to my website, jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com to see more about the membership. And then if you do want to start actually exercising, you can start without ever having to go to a gym.(11:47)
In fact, I recommend the first thing you should try to do is build core strength. That's strengthen the abdominals in the front of your torso, your obliques, transverse abdominis, all the way around your torso and your erectus. Spin A in your back, build up your back and your core strength because that's going to help with your posture, relieve back pain. And that's kind of the foundation of all other exercise. It's hard for you to stay safe doing other types of exercise if you don't have good core strength. Having good core strength is what allows you to keep your back straight when you're squatting, when you're lifting, when you're doing anything. And I mean, how often do you know of somebody who throws their back out? People who throw their backs out just like reaching down to the floor. A lot of times that happens because they have poor core strength and they have poor posture, and so they're putting the spine under load in a not ideal position.(12:43)
So when you train your core strength, and you can do this very easily, just pick one or two exercises and do 10 to 20 repetitions for two or three rounds. Make it easy. Make it like you can do that in under 10 minutes. That can be like five minutes honestly. So build core strength, you can do that at home. Just do some crunches. Hold a plank for 15 to 30 seconds, do some twist crunches, reverse crunches where you keep your head on the floor and you bring your knees towards your chest. All of these are good examples of exercises for your core, and so seriously, powerful foundation. And again, when you get into the habit of doing these every day of doing some core training every day, that is going to make it a lot easier for you to later on, add more onto your workout habit.(13:37)
So make your workout habit initially focused on, let me just build some core strength and do some stretching because it's going to feel good. You're probably stressed. You probably hold a lot of tension in your shoulders and in your hamstrings and in your back. So stretching is another good thing that you can start with and you can do at home. You don't have to do it at a gym. Stretching also has the benefit of allowing you to familiarize yourself with your muscles. If you go to my YouTube channel and you follow along with my exercise tutorial videos, and I'm trying to release a couple of those every week and have them link to a program if you want to do a full program. But when I introduce a stretch or an exercise, I usually will tell you, this is the muscle that this exercise is for.(14:26)
This is where you should feel it. Stretching is a great way for you to learn your muscles without putting yourself at risk of injury as much of a risk of injury because you're not actually putting the muscles under load, you're stretching them. And then later on, when you're ready to add in workouts, you'll already have some familiarity with your muscles and it'll be easier for you to do exercises correctly or with good technique, which will keep your body safe. So stretching helps you to learn your muscles, helps you to relax. You'll just feel better after you stretch and you do some breathing, but it will build onto when you're ready to actually step foot in the gym. So those are my tips for if you want to start improving your health. If you want to start getting in shape, but you're not quite ready to go to the gym, or if you're feeling overwhelmed and you just want somewhere easy to start, those are the easy things that you can start practicing.(15:27)
Now, you don't need any special equipment. You don't need a gym membership. All you need is a water bottle and a notebook or an app if you want to track your food in an app. But that's pretty hands off and those things are important. That's a solid foundation that you'll be able to build on when you're ready to move on. It will improve your heart health, it will improve your fitness levels, and it will also just make it so much easier when you're ready to actually work out. It will also make it so much easier when you're ready to actually go onto a planned diet. I don't necessarily mean going on a diet where you're eating less, but you have an eating plan and you're eating according to a plan. If you already have the habit of knowing how to track your food, it's so much easier to follow a plan after that.
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