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Step 1: Back to basics
Get back to basics with a health check-up, balanced healthy diet, 6-8 glasses of water daily, quality sleep and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Make sure you get enough protein in your diet to prevent muscle breakdown, enhance recovery and increase fat burning for improved body composition. This provides you with a solid platform to begin any exercise.
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Step 2: Planning
Current exercise recommendations include: 30 minutes on most days of the week or accumulate 2½ to 5 hours of moderate intensity, or 1¼ to 2½ hours of vigorous intensity each week with muscle strengthening on at least 2 days. Make time to stretch before (active) and after (passive) your exercise and build up the length and intensity of training gradually to reduce your risk of injury.
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Step 3: Recovery
Your body needs to recover after exercising. Recovery gives you time to refuel glycogen levels in your muscles and liver, replace fluid and electrolytes lost in perspiration, make new muscle protein and repair existing muscle fibres, while balancing your immune system.
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Step 4: Adding value
Adding value with a few key supplements can help to support your body before, during and after exercise:
- Magnesium supports muscle health and function and healthy muscle contraction function. Exercise increases the body's requirements for magnesium. Magnesium supports nervous system health, energy production and a healthy stress response in the body. See Magnesium Forte.
- Glutamine Glutamine is stored in skeletal muscles and supplementing with glutamine helps to preserve muscle levels after exercise and supports muscle health after exercise, plus healthy immune system function and nervous system health. Physical and metabolic stress increases the body's utilisation of and demand for glutamine, so it is beneficial during periods of increased physical stress.
