Too busy to pursue a fitness routine or sticking to diet for your wellness? Yoga trainer Saurabh Bothra says even following a few simple healthy habits every day can be life-changing, rather than making difficult and drastic lifestyle changes.
Bothra, who offers habit-building programs and live guided sessions through his platform HaBuild, shared his top 5 tips for healthy living, in a LiveMint interview. Check out his tips:
1. Drink water: According to the yoga coach, staying hydrated with plain glasses of water can be very beneficial for health. Apart from boosting digestion and enhancing skin health, it also offers one more benefit. Bothra says, “Drinking a lot of water will make you go to the washroom more than once, and encourage movement.”
2. Move: If you are a busy working professional who spends more time sitting than standing, make sure you get up and move around at least after every hour. “In our office, we have a trend of doing an 3-minute activity after every hour. We do squats, deep breathing or anything that makes us move around,” says Bothra, suggesting how to increase movement.
3. Deep breathing: The Nagpur-based trainer highly recommends a session of deep breathing for busy professionals. He says even 5 minutes of conscious breathing practice can feel therapeutic for people who are often caught between work and home-related pressures. “It’s a great stress-buster,” he says. Bothra recommends box breathing (inhale, hold, exhale, and hold, each for a count of four) and coherent breathing (inhale and exhale for the same duration of around 5 seconds)
4. Sleep on time: It’s what our parents told us time and again as kids. Now as adults, it’s time to pay attention to your sleep hygiene. “Everyone to sleep before 11:00 pm at least. However busy you may be, after 11:00 p.m., most people are often just doing time-pass. Good sleep quantity and quality are very important healthy habits,” he adds.
5. Workout: If your schedule does not allow you to workout every day, try it at least thrice a week for 45 minutes each, suggests Bothra, who helps people adopt yoga through his online platform.
Apart from these tips, he has a pro tip to share: “Don’t try to do five things together! It doesn’t work like that. Do a small thing for seven days or 14 days and then start adding one more thing, and then another. Don’t try to do everything at once, otherwise we usually fail and go in that all-or-nothing trap. Either we do everything or we just stop doing, and then wait for 1st of January to come again,” he says.
Stress management is also a very important part of maintaining good health. Asked about his strategy to deal with stress, Bothra responds, “There are days that really get to me. My best practice to deal with stress is to go to sleep. So the days I’m busier, I go to sleep early so that I can make sure that my next day becomes better.”
