Venture Outside Your Comfort Zone

When you’re working toward losing weight, it can be easy to fall into a routine. If you discover an exercise that’s fun and simple to do, it’s natural to want to stick with it and stay in your comfort zone. It feels good to know you can do something active without too much pain and effort. But, when it comes to improving health and fitness, this isn’t the best approach. Having variation in exercise is just as important as working out consistently. 

The fact is, doing the same exercise routine for a long period of time can actually impede your weight-loss efforts and cause you to plateau. Variety is not only fun, it’s important. Changing your routine keeps your muscles guessing. Adding new exercise techniques and challenging your body helps your muscles grow and speeds up your metabolism. The more muscles you have, the more fat you can burn, which is how you lose unwanted pounds and inches.

Even something small like changing the location or time of day for your workout, can motivate you to work harder. A good way to ensure you're building muscle throughout your body is to focus on different areas of the body for each workout, such as having a cardio day, an upper body day, and a lower body day. Or, develop a list of 10 or 15 exercises you like and rotate through them. For example, pick five from a list and do 20 of each exercise for 3 sets. The next day, pick a different set of five and so on. 

Embracing new experiences can benefit your entire body—including your mind. There’s no need to completely overhaul your routine. In fact, a certain measure of familiarity and structure is a good thing. But you can, and should, branch out a bit. A healthy life doesn’t have to be a boring one.