How To Stay Fit in Your 40s

When you’re starting to feel concern for your health in your 40s it’s not too late to start making progress on your own personal fitness and health. 

In fact, as far as the reasons why it’s important to stay fit in your 40s, you’ll find comparable benefits in your long term health and prevention of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality as you’d receive by exercising as an adolescent or when you were twenty years old. 

It’s not too late to take care of yourself and you haven’t missed out on the opportunity to benefit from a healthy lifestyle.

Staying Fit In Your 40’s

At the very least you should strive to get 120 minutes of moderate cardiovascular exercise a week. That’s just 30 minutes a day for 4 days a week. That is a small investment time–wise but you will feel the benefits of increased energy and health that will allow you to thrive and be more efficient throughout your other activities. 

But that is just a baseline to achieve to maintain and promote general health and energy. It is also recommended that you invest time for 2 days each week to also perform muscle-building exercises to combat the loss of muscle mass as you grow older. 

You won’t be bodybuilding exactly with just two 30–minute sessions a week doing pushups, pullups, free weights and squats, this will be enough activity to keep your body feeling strong and solid throughout the years.

You will also want to devote some time to work on your flexibility. 

Stretches should be paired with your exercises and done in a way that promotes loosening up your muscles as well as increasing your comfortable flexibility range. 

When it comes to doing all these exercises, you should be mindful that at this age you really shouldn’t keep “No pain, no gain” as an exercise mantra as you won’t be able to heal or recover from a hard workout as you were when you were younger. Keep to workouts that don’t risk injuring your muscles.

What Exercises Should You Be Doing?

What exercises that are best fit for you will vary a lot depending on what can easily fit into your lifestyle and what you can enjoy performing. 

Some people are comfortable with active hobbies such as hiking, biking or rowing which are all fantastic means of cardio that can be fun to do if they suit your interest. 

But if you’re a person who struggles with personal accountability and fails your new year’s resolution, you should consider group-centric activities that will help support you. 

Personal fitness actually isn’t the best when it’s only you. Having a supportive community around you to encourage you to work and pull you through can keep you working out a lot longer. 

Involve your friends and family and ask them to work out with you. This way, you have a group of people to help keep you dedicated on the days that you don’t really feel like it.

If you don’t struggle with motivation but do struggle with time, then a smart place to invest what little spare time you have is into HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) exercises that can easily cut your cardio time in half, or help condense it into just two 30–minute chunks to fit into your week. 

This type of training is rough but it comes with a heart-healthy intense workout that you can do from your home in Metairie with home exercise equipment such as an elliptical, Stairmaster or spin bike. 

Getting any of these machines in your home with a view of the TV can make for a quick and easy way to get your cardiovascular health in order.

As far as strength training goes, you can go the free weight method of using a folding weight bench, dumbells, and kettlebells to go through a range of exercises to spread the strength maintenance in a balanced way throughout your body. If you’re not into the free weight style or don’t have the money or room to get a simple setup like the above then you can get a rollable exercise or yoga mat for doing lunges, squats, push-ups, etc. This also doubles up well for actually stretching on or doing yoga and other flexibility and strength-building exercises which you can do from home through a variety of internet services depending on your interests.

When you’re ready to get started, visit our Metairie location or one of our other Louisiana Fitness Expo Stores to demo a few machines and learn more about the best path to your fitness goals.