Having a good pre-exercise meal or snack will make a huge difference to your exercise performance and will help avoid gastrointestinal discomfort during exercise. But what about fuel during your workout?

This week, we’re going to dive into the fourth and final “F” of Fitness: Fit, or cardiovascular endurance. Endurance training is any sort of exercise in which you’re moving your body for an extended period of time. Typical endurance activities include jogging, cycling, hiking, swimming, rowing, etc. However, endurance activities also include household chores, cooking, walking a pet, or low-impact sports such as golf.

This week we’re going to focus on another incredibly important function of sleep: removing waste. For all metabolic processes that occur in your body, there is an associated waste. The lymphatic system works with the circulatory system to clear this waste. Lymphatic vessels collect waste from your cells and dump it into the blood to be disposed of to keep your body clean and healthy. But how does the brain dispose of the waste that it accumulates during the day?

A question that comes up a lot is ‘what and when should I eat before my workout?’ The timing and composition of your nutrition can make huge differences to your athletic performance. Understanding how to fuel your body is important for everyone - whether you are an elite athlete or if you just want to be healthy enough to run around with your kids.

Trying to make changes to your lifestyle isn’t easy. We often get caught up in a cycle of “bad habits” that are hard to break. This is because we are meant to conserve energy (remember Decision Fatigue!). The challenge is then to try to implement new habits that will improve your health and performance, and get away from habits that are damaging. In order to do this, we need to make our lifestyle changes as easy as possible and we need to be consistent.

Chronic inflammation is associated with almost all chronic diseases, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and obesity. Inflammation is also elevated in individuals suffering from mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. However, inflammation in itself isn’t bad. Inflammation is a normal process that, in small amounts, helps the body heal. But chronic inflammation can be damaging and lead to health problems.

Sprint interval training, speed work, high intensity interval training, and high intensity intermittent exercise are all considered “fast” workouts. Simply - any workout in which you are varying the pace of your workout session

If we’re exposed to high levels of stress repeatedly without sufficient time to recover, we become exhausted, burned out, stressed, and unable to make good decisions surrounding our health and wellbeing. But if we allow ourselves to have proper rest (both physically and mentally), we are able to amplify our performance - at work and at home.

One of the questions we asked in our recent survey was what your main barriers are when making a change to improve your health. “Lack of motivation” was the top answer...by a landslide. This is a HUGE increase from our survey at the beginning of the pandemic, and while not surprising, we wanted to dedicate a week to addressing this.

In previous newsletters, we’ve discussed the dangers of exposing your eyes to light before bed. Due to our circadian rhythm (our internal biological clock), we naturally feel sleepy at night as the pineal gland releases melatonin, the sleepy hormone. When we expose our eyes to light, a signal is sent from our retina to our brain telling it to stop producing melatonin. Basically, we’re telling our body that it’s daytime instead of nighttime. This can cause an increase in sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep), sleep inertia (drowsiness when you wake up), and an overall reduction in sleep quality. This is why it's incredibly important to dim lights at night and keep your bedroom as dark as possible.

Our recent survey revealed that managing stress and anxiety is still one of the biggest pain points for members of our community. While many of you noted that your physical health has improved since the beginning of the pandemic (nice work!), for many of you, your mental health has gotten worse.

In today’s fast paced world of work, family, and other commitments, it can be hard to stick to a healthy meal plan. It’s much easier to grab a chocolate bar on your way out the door or order take out instead of cooking after a busy day at the office. One of the biggest challenges for people is getting enough vegetables and fruits into their diet. But vegetables and fruits - and vegetables in particular - are so important for health.

We’ve given you a lot of new information this year and it can sometimes be a lot to digest. We know many of you don’t get around to reading the emails every week so every few months, we like to do a recap of what we’ve learned to help solidify ideas and let you catch up if you've fallen a bit behind!

Strength training, or resistance training, is any form of exercise in which your muscles are working against a resistance to produce force. While there are many different variations of resistance training, people tend to love it or hate it. For those of you who are nervous about strength training, here is a basic overview of why you should do it, how to start a strength training program, and why it's not as daunting as you might think!

Just like healthy fats and carbohydrates, high quality proteins are an important part of a balanced diet. This week we’re going to dive into what proteins are, why they’re so important for health, and how you can incorporate both animal and plant-based proteins into every meal.