Visit our Clinic
Suite 6, 506 Miller St, Cammeray
Opening Hours
Mon - Fri 7.30am - 7.30pm, Sat 8am - 12pm

Get your body summer ready

As winter comes to an end we might all be feeling a little more motivated to get healthy.  As the days get longer and a little warmer it’s easier to exercise and lighter, healthier food becomes more tempting. A recent article in SMH gave great tips to start getting your body summer ready:

1. Incidental exercise

The new fad is NEAT fitness – non-exercise activity thermogenesis.  Essentially what it means is adding incidental exercise to your day, such as walking the stairs rather than taking the lift, getting out at lunchtime and walking to do your groceries.  These are all tasks we need to do anyway but by adding a little more exercise you will start to burn extra calories.

2. HIIT

High intensity interval training is great as its short bursts of activity followed by short periods of recovery.  For those time poor trying to fit in exercise its a great way of getting started as it only takes 20 minutes.

3.  Meditate

With life being so hectic it’s rare we get time to ourselves to pause and reflect.  With the warmer days find yourself some time to sit and soak up some spring sunshine rays.

4. Stretch

We always mention stretching is a great way to prevent injury but it can also force some time out.  At the end of a busy day it’s great to get home and spend some time stretching out our stiff muscles and joints.

At Physio On Miller we offer Pilates classes which can help tone and stretch your body ready for summer!

The 7 minute workout

Not enough time to workout?

What if all it took was 7 minutes? What if you could reap the benefits of running and weight bearing exercise without all of the expensive equipment, gym contracts and slogging away on a treadmill for hours on end?

Exciting new evidence has been found by scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Their research shows that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscle comparable to those of several hours of bike riding or running.

Exercise Physiology is fascinating to hear about, but knowing how to put the latest research into practice can be tricky. But the good news is, an article in the American College of Sports Medicine‘s Health & Fitness Journal does just that. With 12 exercises using only your body weight, a chair, and a wall, it fulfils the latest mandates for the 7 minute high intensity work out. And by high intensity, Chris Jordan and his colleagues mean intense periods intermingled with periods of recovery. Their program alternates exercises that utilise large muscles in the upper body with those of the lower body, with 10 seconds to catch your breath in between. The exercises should be performed for 30 seconds in rapid succession, with an intensity of 8 out of 10 on a discomfort scale, Jordan says.

While the old saying ‘no pain, no gain’ holds true, having no time for exercise becomes a thing of the past. So get some friends together, or do it alone and get intense for 7minutes to reap all of the enormous health and fitness benefits from high intensity interval training.