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More is better, right? Not always.

I work with a lot of people who have busy lives: young kids, demanding jobs, lots of plates spinning. More is definitely not better when it comes to increasing the commitments of my clients.

Whether or not you have a busy life in this way, you may still feel overwhelmed with the amount of time you think you need to put into your fitness in order to see results. You see people hitting the gym for an hour at a time, 6 days per week, and you wonder how you could survive that, let alone fit it in!

I'm going to break it down for you, into three main parts to focus on:

1. Movement

In order to pick up a lot of the health benefits associated with exercise, the NHS recommend 150 minutes per week at a moderate level. This means something which gets your heart and breathing rates up for 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week.

But does this mean there are no benefits if you do less than this? Does it mean that doing 15 minutes per day is pointless, for example?

...

As with anything, when we talk about fitness it is important to know what we are actually referring to.

You probably have your own ideas and definitions. Perhaps for you, it’s always conjured up images of athletes, displaying their superhuman abilities. Maybe it’s been about the fitness models you see on the cover of glossy magazines.

But here’s my definition:

Fitness is your ability to cope with and recover from stress.

Simple, right?

So if we divide fitness into physical and mental:

Physical fitness is your ability to cope with and recover from physical stress.

and

Mental fitness is your ability to cope with and recover from mental stress.

Physical stress could be something unusual like running a marathon, or something everyday such as climbing a flight of stairs. It can be anything which puts your body under some kind of strain, and for each of us that will look very different. How we cope with and recover from that stress is down to our physical fitness.

This...