Mind and Body Fitness by the Sparkle Coach Combining Yin and Yang styles will help you achieve your goal

HOLISTIC WELLBEING doesn’t sound as sexy as lose weight, get fit quick and drop a dress size in 10 days.

We want fast, visible and overnight transformations.

But in order to achieve optimal results, to hit our ‘fat loss’ or ‘muscle building’ goals and most of all feel strong, we need to look at a holistic and intuitive look at health and fitness as one entity, taking inspiration from Eastern philosophies that incorporate the mind and body as one, where exercise, nutrition and fulfilment is part of life.

Mindful focus on how we feel and what our body needs is much more than just ‘airy fairy’ talk, it is scientifically proven to help us eat, sleep and move in line with what we need daily rather than an ‘all or nothing’ short-term approach to diet and exercise.

Focusing on a gentle ‘yin’ and more forceful ‘yang’ style energy ‘chi’ flow, in simple terms like interval or fartlek training.

Plus, the key to the ultimate long-lasting mind and body transformation, losing fat or avoiding over-training for example, is being in-tune with our whole selves, which helps us to nourish ourselves so we not only look good but feel it too.

Even top athletes use a flow state in their daily lives to achieve their personal best, they tend to flow between restactivity-pause-restactivity-sleep.

But how can we do it?

Move and stretch within an hour of waking to get our blood flowing and accept that each day we will get two to three hours of pure work or focused flow.

So, if we start to feel overwhelmed with a task, it’s better to have 20-minute deep breathing meditation first.

If like me, you struggle with pausing, you can start simple with relaxing music such as ‘Solfeggio Frequencies’ explains Abigayle Andre, founder of local holistic skincare brand Glam Aesthetics: “These frequencies affect how we feel. “Sound healing dates back to ancient spiritual traditions and research shows it to have positive mental, emotional and physical effects.” This then gives us the energy to exert more into a ‘yang style workout’ or save time on procrastinating on the task in hand as we have a new found laser focus.

We also find that when we’re more relaxed we don’t tend to eat and drink as erratically either.

I know energy pacing is something I have incorporated in recent times to avoid burnout and to improve my performance rather than my initial 24/7 ‘go hard or go home’ mindset.

It’s more important to maintain your form in exercise, work, family and life and most of all reap the rewards of total fitness, rather than go to failure.

Discover the right energy pace or ‘balance’ for your own lifestyle and if possible, always try to do some movement or stretching within the first hour of waking.

Adopting a mindful approach to life impacts how we eat, drink, exercise to achieve our personal goals and most of all to sustain better habits.