One of the key ingrdeieints in creating an exercise program that is sustainable is to minimize the interference to the rest of your life. Particularly in the beginning phase of your exercise program your  nutritional and rest requirements to your more active lifestyle will probably change.

Firstly your fruit and vegetable intake needs to increase to combat what is known as oxidative stress from exercise. Oxidative stress is the production of these bad guys called free radicals that cause all types of damage to your body causing anything from wrinkles to cancer. These free radicals are like the sparks that fly off from the fire that can do damage to your house if you don’t have a firescreen.

When you exercise your internal fire gets bigger givng you more energy but you also give off more sparks. That’s why you need to increase our firescreen by increasing  your fruit and vegetable intake. Fruits and vegetables help neutralize free radical production.

Many of us have given up on exercising due to illness, injuries and aches and pains. Most of this can be prevented with adequate fruit and vegtable consumption and a bit if rest.

Some people think that they have that covered by taking a multivitamin or antioxidants. They are not fruits and vegetables and they don’t get absorbed into your body. Fruits and vegetables have 12 455 different vitamin, minerals and antioxidants. If you are having trouble increasing your fruit and vegetable intake i recommend you try what i have been taking for the last 10 years…

It’s called Juice Plus. It’s a fruit and vegetable supplement that has been shown to reduce the level of free radicals by around 75% and one third of the subjects showed  no free radical damage at all. A recent study also found that it helped lower the markers of this oxidative stress resulting from extreme exercise performed by a Swiss anti-terrorist squad.

One of the more demanding days of training involve running for more than 80 minutes. I originally started doing this early on Sunday mornings and then I would meet my family at the beach where our children would be doing training at the local surf life saving club for the following two and a half hours. The problem was that by the time we got home i was feeling too weak and tired to do much at all. I burnt up so much fuel during my run and i hadn’t replaced it with any good nutrition ( only water).

I’ve now changed my time for my more demanding exercise to late saturday afternoons or late Sunday afternoons depending upon my family, business and social committments. I’ll choose whichever time best allows me to have a good meal after my exercise and put my feet up and have after all recovery is as important as your exercise.