During the off-season a lot of golfers take life easy—sometimes a little too easy. When snow and ice are covering the practice range and those long walks for 18 holes are impossible, it’s easy to let exercise go. But if you want to maintain a healthy lifestyle and keep yourself fit for golf, it’s important to build a few essentials into your day.
Kathy Ekdahl of PersonalBestPersonalTraining.com and our fitness guru here at golfgurls.com has three simple steps she recommends to all her clients.
Drink more water. Yes, I know, we have heard this hundreds of times before. But recent research has shed more light on why this is so essential. We all know that drinking water fills us up and prevents dehydration (which can mimic hunger), but recent research has shown that drinking water actually elevates your metabolism as well!
Commit to 15 minutes of exercise each day. I call it the “15 Minute Rule”. No matter how tired you are, how stressed, commit to the 15 minutes. Any exercise will do, the key is making the commitment to yourself. 15 minutes is easy, right? It really is just a trick… once you start the session, you’ll tend to do more than the 15 minutes. Plus, you are actually managing your time so that, later, when you can and should do more exercise, the time is set already.
Discover and eliminate the “big ticket” items. Some of my clients waste time making nutritional changes that don’t mean much calorically or nutritionally. They change the milk in their coffee to skim, but then they have a huge bagel and cream cheese with it! Attack the high calorie obvious items first. Ice Cream, sweets, chips, get them out of your house.
Avoid pub food restaurant. High fat, high carb foods like nachos, french fries, burgers etc. Pub food and cheesy/pasta dishes often have upwards of 1500 calories a meal!
With these first simple steps you’ll stay healthy and be ready for the next season.
Watch for more healthy tips in future columns. In the meantime, what are you doing right now to stay healthy and prepare yourself for a great season of golf?
