Fitness can be complicated but there are ways to simplify your workouts so that you don’t feel overwhelmed. A minimalist approach to fitness can help you focus on the basics to reaching and maintaining good health and wellness.
If you’ve recently started a fitness journey but are feeling confused by contradictory information, lacking daily motivation, pressed for time, or bombarded by fancy equipment and trendy fitness workouts, then sticking with a minimalist approach may be ideal for you.
When things become too complicated (like watching Instagram feeds of fitness influencers or professionals doing complex exercises with so many types of bands, balls, sliders, gliders, and the list goes on), it can cause confusion and procrastination.
Rather than giving up on your fitness routine altogether, it’s better to find things that you can easily perfect and are capable of doing, which you enjoy, and makes you feel good afterward. This can mean partaking in a fitness class, a group training session, or finding a few key exercises that you can do on your own. This increases the chances of sticking with a routine on a consistent basis.
Three Essential Parts of Your Minimalist Fitness Approach
Here are the three essentials to include in your minimalist fitness approach: cardio, strength, mobility.
Cardio:
You can do complete cardiovascular activity separately, if desired. A minimalist approach to cardio can mean doing brisk walking, jogging, running, cycling, rowing, swimming, skipping with a jump rope, doing the elliptical or stair climber, or playing sports.
Alternatively, you can combine cardio and strength exercises together with HITT (high intensity interval training) workouts or circuit training to maximize your time and effort. With a minimalist approach, it may be easier to partake in a group HITT or circuit training class to take the guesswork and stress out of planning the exercises.
The general guideline is to do 30 minutes of cardio per day (or 150 to 300 minutes per week). You can divide your cardiovascular workouts according to your weekly schedule, whether that be 5 days a week for 30 minutes, or 3 days a week for 45 minutes to an hour.
Strength:
With a minimalist approach, focus on key strength exercises that utilize the big muscle groups for functional fitness and to increase metabolic demand. Functional fitness means fitness to help you with everyday life and daily activities that you’d normally do (grocery shopping, playing with the kids, doing laundry, gardening, etc.).
Focus on exercises that use multiple muscle groups. This includes:
Squats and lunges for lower body
Push-ups, pull-ups, overhead presses for upper body
Bent over rows, dead lifts, hip thrusts for back and pelvic floor muscles
Planks, oblique twists, and crunches for the core
You can divide your strength training between two or three days per week.
Mobility:
Mobility includes movement to help increase flexibility and range of motion, reduce the risk of injury, and aid in recovery. Your minimalist approach should include a dynamic warm up (a warm up where there’s constant movement) and a static stretch cool down (where you hold the movement in that position for a certain amount of time). This should be paired with your workouts (and can be completed in 5 to 10 minutes). Your minimalist approach can also include doing a yoga class or yoga exercises once a week.
Instead of trying to do so many variations of an exercise and spending all your time at an exercise facility, be a fitness minimalist by performing basic and functional but impactful exercises, and doing activities that you enjoy but still feel physically challenging (whether that means increasing your speed or weight). Including these three elements (cardio, strength, mobility) can help to maintain an overall healthy lifestyle, create confidence in your fitness abilities, and create consistency and sustainability to maintain a fitness routine for life.
Good luck! Leave a comment and let me know what you think.