How to create an effective workout plan with Adrenal and Thyroid Conditions
Creating an effective dieting and exercise plan requires us to fully understand our bodies, its health, and what we need to keep it performing optimally. Adrenal and Thyroid conditions are as simple as they are complex. In recent years the medical community as a whole have begun to understand and learn more about these conditions and what they mean for our health.
Both have impacts on not just our health but our weights as well. For this reason, many people suffering from these conditions will want to increase their workouts and weight loss efforts. It seems logical but it should not be done with haste or be something that is taken lightly.
The purpose of this “How To” article will be to first explore the diseases themselves and then explore how to craft the right exercise routine for your body. You will notice that there are connections between both adrenal and thyroid conditions which makes talking about them in a pair a smart thing to do. In both cases, it is important and vital to understanding how they impact your life going forward.
For those of you who aren’t experts and even for those of you who think you are (and maybe you are), let us begin with the basics. What are adrenal glands? Adrenal glands are smaller sized glands located at the top of each one of your kidneys. Their primary function is to create hormones that your body cannot live without. These include sex hormones and cortisol which helps you handle stress. Whether your body is producing too little or conversely too much this is what makes for an adrenal condition.
The thyroid is a different part of the body but is also a key part of the hormone process in our bodies. The thyroid is located in the neck and it secretes hormones that regulate growth and development as part of the metabolic process. Conditions revolving around the thyroid can vary in size and seriousness, but most will be based around over or underproduction of hormones.
In life, balance is often the key to success. The good news for anyone who has been recently diagnosed with one of these conditions is that simple lifestyle changes are a good place to start. This will start off by cutting out the bad toxic stuff in your life like caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. From here you will want to fix and regulate your sleep schedule. Next up is the diet, which will be key in your future. Making sure you are getting your proper daily intake of nutrients and vitamins will help your body stabilize. Lastly, you’ll want to conquer your stress. This will come from managing stressors in your life as well as finding healthy ways to cope with stress in your life. Remember that cortisol, which is produced by your adrenal glands, is a key part of your stress management process. Having an adrenal condition means you need to keep your stress under control.
Do you know what a great stress management tool is? Getting in a good workout. Working out may be the best way to blow off steam and should be something you now work into your daily routine.
A good plan starts with starting easy and then progressively adding more and more to it. Movement is one of the biggest keys to good health. Set an easy daily steps goal to get yourself going. Doing household chores that require being on your feet and moving. Take on the vacuuming, dust, use a push lawn mower, take out the trash. Every bit of movement will help and put you on your journey to a healthier life.
As you are getting your strength back and a grasp on your overall health, you will want to start adding in the next step in your workout progression. In this stage, you will want to work in things that help your body heal and allow you to manage and control the stress in your life. A good place to start here is to build in some light yoga. Intense forms of yoga can be too hard for your body at this point, but light yoga will work to stretch out your body and help you find some helpful breathing techniques. Another suggestion to build in here is to look to mediation. We are focusing on not just improving your physical health but your mental and emotional as well. The combination of yoga and meditation will help you relax and rest your mind and find some peace in your life.
Let us recap to this point. We now understand the conditions we’ve been diagnosed with and what we need to do to get on track to a healthy future. We know that we need to find ways to handle and manage stress as well we need to create a healthy and well-balanced diet full of the nutrients and vitamins our body needs. From here we want to get ourselves moving! Movement is vital in a healthy life and will lay the foundation of the new journey we are now on to get better. From here we will mix in some light workouts to stretch our bodies, strengthen our cores, and use meditation to help us relax, restore, and find peace.
Now we turn an eye to strength.
Strength training is another important step in your journey here. Strength training sounds simple, but it is probably the most misunderstood category in working out. Sure, deadlifts and enormous weightlifters squatting a few hundred pounds are activities that are part of strength training, but that is not all that it means. In our case, we are looking to build some baseline strength to reap the important and crucial health benefits that it provides. Strength training helps you with increasing your metabolism, this is important for our purposes for obvious reasons, build muscle, and it will help you burn fat. With these conditions, these three things will be very important.
Like this entire process, we are looking to start slow. It is important to not push too far or to rush looking for some overnight, lottery-type results. All things in due time. We want to work to build a baseline of strength to help our bodies and to set them up for the future to add more training to them. Start with simple exercises like push-ups, crunches, and planks. Get familiar with what your body can handle and build up as you go. Slow and steady, as they say.
Now that we’ve built up some stamina and strength, we will want to work in some more stress reducing work. One of the best ways to combine strength, movement, and stress relief is getting out into nature. Taking up casual or light hiking as a hobby is a good way to get away from the stressors of daily life and will get you moving and help your metabolism and help you burn fat. For these reasons, this is a great activity to add to your repertoire.
At this point, all that is left to add is endurance and conditioning. For this, high-intensity interval training will be a valuable tool to use for you. It is, as it sounds, you spend short intervals doing high-intensity workouts followed by even shorter periods of rest. These exercises are designed and aimed at getting you moving with intensity and burning fat. This gives you the ability to go hard for a short period of time, get your heart rate up, and to break a sweat.
The key here, and not to stress this yet again, is to start small and build up. Here a few HIIT workouts you can do to get started and build up from.
Jumping Jacks is a great cardio workout that can be easily done at home. Start by doing jumping jacks for 20 seconds and then resting for 10 seconds and then repeat this formula two more times. This means you will do this work out for an entirety of one minute and thirty seconds.
Per earlier in this article, we’ve been working in some strength building around pushups for some time now So let us add these to our HIIT workout using the same formula above. Do as many push-ups as you can for 20 seconds, then rest for ten seconds, and repeat this formula twice more.
Let’s look at one last HIIT workout that we can start with and build up from. Butt kicks are another great way to get the heart rate up, get the blood flowing, and get the calories burning. A butt kick is a simple jog in place where the leg that is kicking back you kick all the way up to your butt. You repeat this over and over, alternating between your two legs. Again, we will start by doing 20-second interval of working out followed by ten seconds of rest and repeating this process two more times.
The overall theme to remember is to listen to your body and build slowly. Do not over exert yourself and build strength in a slow and steady fashion. If this plan doesn’t work for you, don’t be afraid to switch some things in that work better. Have a plan and a process but be prepared to tailor it to what your needs are. Hope this helps!