The Powerful Trio: Gut Health, Exercise, and Mental Health

Imagine your body as a finely tuned orchestra. Each section—gut health, exercise, and mental health—plays a crucial part in creating a beautiful symphony of well-being. When one section is out of tune, the whole performance suffers. But when all three sections are in harmony, the result is a masterpiece of health and happiness. Let’s dive into this fascinating trio and discover practical tips to keep your orchestra playing at its best.

Gut Health: The Foundation of Wellness

Think of your gut as the conductor of this orchestra, setting the tempo and ensuring every section plays in unison. Often referred to as the “second brain,” your gut is home to trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that influence everything from digestion to immune function—and even your mood. Yes, your gut talks to your brain!

Key Functions of the Gut Microbiome:

  • Digestion and Nutrient Absorption: Your gut microbiome breaks down food, making nutrients more accessible and easier to absorb.
  • Immune System Support: A healthy gut boosts your immune system, helping to fend off infections and inflammation.
  • Mood Regulation: Your gut produces neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, which play crucial roles in stabilizing your mood and mental health.

Tips for a Healthy Gut:

  • Balanced Diet: Fill your plate with fiber-rich foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes to feed those beneficial bacteria.
  • Probiotics and Prebiotics: Enjoy probiotic-rich foods like yogurt, kefir, and sauerkraut, and prebiotic foods like garlic, onions, and bananas to support your gut flora.
  • Stay Hydrated: Drinking plenty of water helps maintain the mucosal lining of your intestines and keeps your gut bacteria balanced.
  • Limit Processed Foods: Cut back on high-sugar and high-fat processed foods that can disrupt your gut microbiome.

Exercise: A Natural Mood Booster

Next, consider exercise as the rhythm section, providing the beat that energizes and uplifts the entire performance. Regular physical activity can help alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress while giving your brain a cognitive boost.

How Exercise Enhances Mental Health:

  • Endorphin Release: Exercise triggers the release of endorphins, your body’s natural mood lifters.
  • Stress Reduction: Physical activity lowers levels of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
  • Improved Sleep: Regular exercise helps regulate your sleep patterns, leading to better sleep and improved mental health.
  • Cognitive Function: Exercise promotes the growth of new neurons and enhances brain plasticity, improving memory and cognitive function.

Exercise Tips for Mental Health:

  • Find Enjoyable Activities: Choose exercises you love, whether it’s dancing, hiking, swimming, or playing a sport. It’s easier to stay active when you’re having fun!
  • Start Slow: If you’re new to exercise, begin with small, manageable workouts and gradually increase intensity and duration.
  • Consistency Over Intensity: Regular moderate exercise is more beneficial for mental health than sporadic high-intensity workouts.
  • Incorporate Mind-Body Practices: Activities like yoga and tai chi combine physical movement with mindfulness, offering dual benefits for mental health.

The Gut-Brain-Exercise Connection

Finally, visualize the gut-brain-exercise connection as the strings section, weaving intricate melodies that tie everything together. The gut-brain axis, a communication network linking your gut and brain, plays a vital role in this connection. Exercise influences this axis in multiple ways.

Exercise and Gut Health:

  • Diversity of Microbiome: Regular physical activity is associated with a more diverse gut microbiome, which is linked to better health outcomes.
  • Anti-inflammatory Effects: Exercise can reduce inflammation in the gut, promoting a healthier environment for beneficial bacteria.
  • Enhanced Gut Motility: Physical activity stimulates intestinal contractions, aiding digestion and reducing the risk of gastrointestinal disorders.

Gut Health and Mental Health:

  • Neurotransmitter Production: A healthy gut microbiome supports the production of neurotransmitters like serotonin, directly impacting mood and emotional well-being.
  • Reduced Inflammation: Gut health influences systemic inflammation, which is linked to various mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety.

Practical Integration

So, how do you bring this powerful trio together in your daily life?

  • Holistic Approach: Embrace a holistic approach to wellness by simultaneously focusing on gut health, regular exercise, and mental well-being.
  • Mindful Eating and Moving: Pay attention to how food and exercise make you feel and adjust your habits to support both physical and mental health.
  • Stress Management: Incorporate stress-reducing practices like meditation, deep breathing, and mindfulness to complement the benefits of a healthy gut and regular exercise.

Conclusion

Understanding the intricate relationship between gut health, exercise, and mental health opens up new avenues for improving your overall well-being. By nurturing your gut with a balanced diet, engaging in regular physical activity, and prioritizing mental health, you can harness the power of this interconnected trio to enhance your quality of life. Embrace this holistic approach and watch the transformative effects on both your body and mind unfold.

Take care of yourself, listen to your body, and enjoy the journey to better health and happiness. Your body’s orchestra is ready to play its most beautiful symphony yet.

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Women, Hormone Changes, and Strength Training: A Comprehensive Guide

woman lifting

Strength training isn’t just about lifting weights—it’s about empowering yourself and embracing your body’s natural rhythms. For women, understanding how hormonal changes influence strength training can make a world of difference in optimizing workouts and overall health. Let’s delve into how your hormones interact with your strength training routine, providing practical tips and insights to harness their power effectively.

The Hormonal Landscape: An Exploration

Menstrual Cycle Phases

Follicular Phase (Days 1-14)

  • Early Follicular Phase: Ah, the beginning of menstruation. Oestrogen and progesterone levels are low, but don’t let that deter you.
  • Late Follicular Phase: Estrogen levels rise as ovulation approaches, and you might notice a boost in your mood and energy.

Ovulation (Around Day 14)

  • Estrogen peaks, and luteinizing hormone (LH) surges, signaling the release of an egg. This is your body’s peak performance window.

Luteal Phase (Days 15-28)

  • Progesterone rises along with a secondary increase in oestrogen. If pregnancy doesn’t occur, both hormones drop, and you prepare to cycle again.

Hormonal Effects on Strength Training: Your Personalized Guide

Follicular Phase:

  • Strength and Performance: The rise in oestrogen during the late follicular phase enhances muscle recovery and strength gains. Embrace this anabolic power!
  • Training Focus: Go for high-intensity workouts, heavy lifting, and progressive overload techniques. This is your time to push boundaries.

Ovulation:

  • Strength and Performance: With peak oestrogen levels, you’ll experience optimal muscle performance and energy levels.
  • Training Focus: Maximize your efforts in strength training and high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Your body is ready to excel.

Luteal Phase:

  • Strength and Performance: Higher progesterone can cause fatigue and reduced muscle efficiency. You might also experience water retention and bloating.
  • Training Focus: Shift to moderate-intensity workouts, focusing on maintenance rather than personal records. Incorporate more recovery and mobility work.

Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT): Embracing New Phases

Menopause:

  • Hormonal Changes: There’s a significant decrease in oestrogen and progesterone levels.
  • Impact on Training: Expect reduced muscle mass and strength, an increased risk of osteoporosis, and potential weight gain.

HRT:

  • Benefits: HRT can alleviate some menopausal symptoms, improve muscle mass, and enhance recovery.
  • Training Adaptations: Keep a regular strength training routine, focusing on resistance exercises to combat muscle loss and support bone health.

Practical Tips for Strength Training Across Hormonal Changes: Your Action Plan

  • Track Your Cycle: Use apps or journals to monitor your menstrual cycle and identify patterns in energy and performance.
  • Adjust Training Intensity: Align high-intensity workouts with the follicular phase and ovulation, and scale back during the luteal phase.
  • Side Note: Some studies suggest that resistance training during your follicular phase results in more significant strength gains than training only in your luteal phase. So, aim to increase repetitions, sets, or weights during this time for optimal results.

Understanding Your Cycle

Nutrition and Recovery

  • Protein Intake: Ensure adequate protein intake to support muscle repair and growth, especially during the follicular phase.
  • Hydration: Stay hydrated, particularly during the luteal phase to counteract water retention.
  • Sleep and Recovery: Prioritize quality sleep and recovery practices like stretching and foam rolling to enhance overall performance.

Mindful Training

  • Listen to Your Body: Pay attention to how you feel during different phases of your cycle and adjust workouts accordingly.
  • Mental Health: Hormonal fluctuations can impact mood and motivation. Incorporate stress-relief techniques such as mindfulness and yoga.

Strength Training for Menopausal Women: Staying Strong and Resilient

  • Consistency: Stay consistent with strength training to maintain muscle mass and bone density.
  • Variety: Include a mix of resistance training, weight-bearing exercises, and flexibility work.
  • Support: Seek guidance from fitness professionals who understand the unique challenges of menopause and can tailor programs to your needs.

Conclusion: Embrace the Journey

Hormonal changes are a natural part of life for women, influencing various aspects of health and fitness. By understanding and working with these fluctuations, you can optimize your strength training routines, enhance performance, and improve overall well-being. Embrace the journey, listen to your body, and empower yourself with the knowledge to make the most of every workout. This is your path to strength and resilience—celebrate it!

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Boxercise

Utilising the age old training principles of Boxing and adapting them to form a fun, safe and stress busting work out, Boxercise  is a high energy fitness class that really gets your heart rate up and your body working!

With over 1.2 million men and women in the UK regularly undertaking Boxing based workouts, this training is suitable for all ages and fitness standards. This is the first fitness class of its kind to hit Switzerland. Don’t miss out!!

It is a full body Cardiovascular workout and you can burn up-to 420 calories in just a one hour session! You use a huge array of muscleswhile working on your body movements, agility and momentum.  Boxing is one of the most effective, concise ways to get in shape and maintain your physical health….. and it’s a lot of fun too!

 

What do I get out of Boxercise?

Boxercise is one of the most effective forms of cross-training available today. Not only will your strength, power, and cardiovascular fitness improve but you will also see improvements in focus and concentration, energy levels, muscular and core strength, stamina, hand-eye coordination and mental agility too. As if that was not enough, training through boxing also stimulates your mind boosting your mental well-being and self-esteem!

Classes can take a variety of formats; a firm favourite however is a circuit style class including: shadow-boxing, skipping, hitting pads, kicking punch bags, press-ups, shuttle-runs and sit-ups. As no class involves the physical hitting of an opponent, it is a fun, challenging and safe workout.

 

  • Improves hand-eye coordination You may not think about the importance of hand-eye coordination and its effect on total health, but hand-eye coordination plays an important role in a person’s gross and fine motor skills. With boxing, your body will improve evenly on both sides, reducing postural misalignment. This is particularly important during ageing, as coordination and balance become compromised, increasing the risk of falls.
  • Increases stamina – The sport has been estimated as approximately 70-80% anaerobic and 20-30% aerobic. Anaerobic means to conduct an activity without oxygen. Anaerobic exercise, like boxing, stresses the muscles at a high intensity for short periods of time.
  • Increases mental agility: Boxing is a great outlet for stress for two reasons: First, during a boxing workout you typically transition between high intensity bouts of exercise and moderate intensity recovery periods. When you’re pushing yourself through a couple minutes of high-intensity punching or kicking, you don’t have much mental power left to worry about how much you hate your job, or the fact your house is a mess. And even during rest periods, you’ll be focused on sucking wind and mentally preparing for the next round, not stressing over other aspects of your life in that hour. Second, there’s an incredibly cathartic release when you get to take some of your stress out on a punching bag. It’s an empowering feeling to punch the stress right out of you!!
  • Improves total body strength During a boxing workout, you may punch or kick a bag hundreds of times, requiring your upper body, lower body, and core to engage as you make contact with the pads/bag. Boxing improves muscle strength used in everyday activities, as well as the ‘fast twitch’ muscle fibres required for shorter, more explosive movements.

So, if you’re worried or nervous about stepping into the madness of a Boxercise class, please don’t be! Take my word for it, as soon as you’re in the class you’ll love it! Try it for yourself, come to the class on a Thursday evening at at 19:15 at ZüriFit in Adliswil. Book online now at; mbody@mbodypt.ch

 

 

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‘Harness’ing the power of the Bungee

‘Harness’ing the power of the Bungee…… a new and fun way to stay fit?

First hitting the scene last summer when it’s taster video went viral, bungee fitness has spread like wild fire. Originating in Bangkok, Thailand it is sweeping across the US, UK and Australia. It has now finally arrived in Europe, and is showing no signs of slowing down.

One of the hardest things about fitness training is ensuring your workouts stay innovative, targeted and fun. Standing on a treadmill 3 times a week can quickly get monotonous and makes the whole process of staying fit harder and quite uninspiring. Enter Bungee fitness, a revolutionary training methodology that is fun in large measures. This gravity defying workout will have you grinning from ear to ear as you glide, bounce and soar around the room. The best thing about it is, you will be having so much fun you won’t even realise how much work it is until your heart rate is pumping and you are left dripping in sweat!

It starts with you being fastened into a harness which is then attached to a bungee cord descending from the ceiling. From here, you will perform various acrobatic manoeuvres, ones which you’d never think you’d be able to perform without the safety of the bungee cord. One handed planks, cartwheels, dives and even one handed handstands are all just examples of the sheer diversity that can be incorporated into Bungee Fitness.

And what a killer on the core!! Bungee workouts really target the transverse abdominals, an area that a lot of workouts neglect. As well as being a highly effective way of burning calories and building muscle, exercising on the Bungee will also improve your movements and flexibility by taking the impact out of your leaps and bounds so your joints don’t absorb the shock; allowing you to move more skilfully as you fly around the room.

My personal favourite is ‘Bungee Tabata’. Tabata is a form of exercise created by Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata and is a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout, featuring exercise routines that last four minutes*. Performing Tabata on the Bungee allows you to be more creative with your movements while you’re working out to your max during the 20 second active period: running, jumping, spinning and diving through the air.

I have been leading Bungee Fitness classes for the last month now and one of the most rewarding parts of the workout is seeing how the ropes bring out the child-like nature in all the people that I have trained so far. I have seen people of all ages and abilities throw themselves into this workout and come out wanting more.

You can check out our classes and packages via the bungee-fit.ch website. Click on the link and take your first leap into the world of bungee fitness.

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HIIT – Breaking down the fat!

High intensity interval training, or HIIT as its better known, is a form of exercise in which you give 100% effort through quick, intense bursts of exercise, followed by short, sometimes active, rest periods. HIIT has become very popular and well-known for its benefits: it helps build muscle mass, increases the amount of calories you burn during a workout session and most importantly its a fantastic fat-busting workout that continues to burn fat for up to 24 hours after your workout has ended. The bursts of intense periods of exercise followed by the intermittent recovery periods all contribute to the metabolic adaptation that enables you to use more fat as fuel under a variety of conditions. This promotes improvements to your endurance as well as your fat burning potential.

A great example of a HIIT workout is sprinting close to your maximum speed for 30 seconds followed by walking for 30 seconds. The workouts usually involve specified work and rest intervals, as well as a number of sets to complete. The above example would be described at a 1:1 work-to-rest ratio. What is key here is that the exercises must be performed at 80% to 95% of your maximum heart rate*. The rest intervals should then be performed at 40% to 50% of your HRmax. The good news, for those of you with a busy schedule is that the optimal HIIT session can be completed in just 20 – 30 minutes. If your workout lasts more than 30 minutes you’re probably not working hard enough in that time to realise the benefits.

Numerous studies have even pointed to the benefits of HIIT reversing some changes in protein expression that are linked to ageing, including some related to our mitochondria function. Now, it won’t turn back the hands of time when it comes to your skin, but on a more technical slant HIIT can help to breath new life into the protein building factories in our cells and enhance the energy producing capacity of our cells powerhouses, known as mitochondria. As we get older, the ability of our mitochondria to produce energy gradually diminishes and so improving their efficiency, in theory, helps to fight off the effects of old age.

As if that isn’t enough, the other fantastic thing about HIIT is that you can perform it anywhere be it in the gym using equipment, outside utilising varied cardio formats or at home with weighted or bodyweight exercises. There are many ways to take advantage of this training method. You will need to bring your motivation though, as this type of workout provides optimal benefits when you are pushing up to your maximum heart rate, so get prepared to struggle, sweat and give it your absolute all. If your not going all out and sweating buckets, you’re not doing it right!

Now, lets have a look at a couple HIIT workout options. Always remember to warm your muscles up first for 5 to 10 minute with a good warm up using either the treadmill, rowing machine, or doing some dynamic stretches.

Option 1 – HIIT you can do at home

Jump squats – 45 seconds

Mountain climbers – 45 seconds

Bum kicks – 45 seconds

Burpees – 45 seconds

Alternating side lunge – 45 seconds

Alternating Jump lunges – 45 seconds

Do each of these moves for 45 seconds, resting for 15 seconds after each exercise. Repeat this circuit twice.

Option 2 – HIIT you can do in the gym

Standing Shoulder press – 30 seconds

Weighted Squats – 30 seconds

Battle ropes – 30 seconds

Cardio – Rowing machine – 90 seconds

Do each of the resistance exercises for 30 seconds and rest for 15 seconds in-between followed by 90 seconds of Cardio. Repeat 3-4 times.

Option 3 – Varying your intensity on cardio equipment

Stairclimber – 60 seconds high speed/60 seconds low speed, repeat.

Bike Tabata – 20 seconds sprint/ 10 seconds rest, repeat.

Treadmill Sprints –  40 seconds / 20 seconds of: walk/incline walk, walk/jog, or run/sprint respectively.

These are just a few options to get you started. There are many ways to create high intensity intervals by adapting the timing of your MAX workout vs your rest period. 2-3 days a week is a solid amount of HIIT and you will see the results of your hard work in no time. If you want to workout 4 times a week, I would suggest doing 2 HIIT sessions per week with 2 Resistance Sessions as well.

For additional information on HIIT or to book in for your first session visit www.mbodypt.ch and get in touch. I would be happy to discuss your goals and aspirations before creating a training program designed specifically for you.

However you decide to incorporate HIIT training into your workout programme you know you have plenty of options to choose from. So pick your playlist, grab your water bottle and lets HIIT it!

* The basic way to calculate your maximum heart rate is to subtract your age from 220. For example, if you’re 45 years old, subtract 45 from 220 to get a maximum heart rate of 175. This is the maximum number of times your heart should beat per minute during exercise.

 

 

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