Five Reasons Why Fitness is Important for Entrepreneurs It's all about being "Kind to yourself" and having a clear cut plan about your health goals.
By Gautam Kapur
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Being an entrepreneur in today's competitive business environment is no easy task as it involves hectic schedules that could include extensive traveling and long hours. Fitness is simple math. It's all about being "Kind to yourself" and having a clear-cut plan for your health goals. Finding that self-love is the key but unless you embark on that journey and feel that surge of positivity you will never know!
Today's entrepreneur must be conscious about not being deceived and strike a balance and to be in Synergy with one's Axis!
Given below are few reasons why reasons why fitness is important for entrepreneurs
Staying fit helps keep stress at bay and your Cortisol levels in check. Cortisol is your body's main stress hormone. It works with certain parts of your brain to control your mood, motivation, and fear. Too much stress can derail your body's most important functions. It can also lead to a number of health problems such as anxiety, depression, headaches, heart disease, memory and concentration problems, trouble sleeping and weight gain. Hence, a daily vigorous exercise regimen releases the feel-good hormones and keeps the endorphins flowing, making you feel alive and prevents you from getting burnt out.
Being fit helps in cognitive health or executive functioning. The term executive functions refer to the higher-level cognitive skills you use to control and coordinate your other cognitive abilities and behaviours. The term is a business metaphor, suggesting that your executive functions are akin to the chief executive that monitors all of the different departments so that the company can move forward as efficiently and effectively as possible. How we organize our lives, how we plan and execute those plans is largely guided by our executive system. When you focus on diet and exercise, you will feel the benefits within your brain. You get rid of the fog that clouds your brain and memory and your cognitive functions are sharper than they have ever been. Exercise helps create new brain cells thus new neural pathways. This is called Neurogenesis. This keeps you ahead of your game and helps you think out of the box.
When you exercise, you sweat and you release toxins accumulated by the body. This helps in detoxification of heavy metals, defeating harmful microbes and helps lower stress hormones. The advantage is that you will find your skin glowing, tightening and feel radiant. This visible change helps you look good, feel good and helps you send out positive vibrations at the workplace.
Fitness is a major confidence booster that plays a major role in today's dynamic world. A fit entrepreneur exudes a certain aura and confidence about himself. Your posture and body language say it all.
Lifestyle diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are rampant among young and middle-aged individuals in today's world due to high stress, undisciplined lifestyle and poor food habits. By 2020 cardiovascular disease in India will be the largest reason for death and disability. Diabetes is at an all-time high and the average age of a diabetic is 40 years. Hence, being active for at least 150 minutes per week and embarking on the fitness highway can greatly reduce these risks.
To be fit is necessary for mental wellbeing and it has been proven that sport and high-intensity fitness is 90% impacts mental functioning. Training with weights is a mood elevator and confidence booster with many more advantages. Nowadays top athletes and entrepreneurs have life coaches and physical wellness experts to help them break barriers in sport and other types of endurance related fitness activities. This helps them perform better in the boardroom and helps gain a competitive edge.
Hitting the gym or running the marathon comes with a lot of discipline and 'Mind Training' which brings about focus, confidence and inspires the individual to apply the same method at the office. As it is rightly said "Physical fitness is linked to Brain Fitness'