Fitness Tips for Contractors With Active Physical Jobs
If you live a sedentary life, it goes without saying that you need to start to set aside time for exercise. For instance, if you work a day job all day, incorporating regular exercise can boost your mood and your physical health. This will help you avoid the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, such as the increased risk of heart disease. But what if you don’t live a sedentary life? For instance, let’s say you’re a contractor with an already active physical lifestyle. Do you still need to work on your fitness? The short answer is yes. Read on to find more fitness tips for contractors to help you achieve your active physical goals.
Benefits of Working Out When You Have a Physically Demanding Job
There are many different types of contractors, including garage door repair contractors, excavating contractors, and plumbing contractors. While these different types of contractors work in different fields, they mostly have one thing in common. The work they do requires manual labor and a certain level of fitness. For instance, a roof repair contractor may spend most of their time climbing up on roofs to repair asphalt shingles. Similarly, plumbers may have to dig trenches to fix burst pipes or wriggle under kitchen sinks to diagnose a clog. The important question is, why should these people also focus on active physical workouts?
The long answer is that a physically demanding job can take its toll on the body. For instance, it can greatly weaken your joints and stress your back, muscles, and even heart. On the other hand, active physical workouts at the gym, outdoors, or at home offer many benefits. They strengthen the heart instead of stressing it. Focusing on exercise that improves your fitness can also boost your mobility and endurance while doing wonders for your posture and bone density. In addition, it allows you to build muscle the right way in a more controlled way. Other benefits of exercising even when you have a physically demanding job include improved mood and mental health, plus better inflammation and pain management.
Tips to Balance a Physically Demanding Job and Working Out
Whether you’re a fence contractor, a home building contractor, or an HVAC contractor, here are some top tips you can apply to ensure that you can balance your physically demanding job and your need to live a more active physical lifestyle.
Avoid Over Training
Having a physically demanding job means that you’ll feel tired the majority of the time. In that case, you have to be flexible enough to adjust your training volume. Sure, you may be enthusiastic about getting fit and hitting your goals sooner, but the truth is over training will only set you back. The most important thing is to show up and do the work at a pace that works for your body. Don’t be afraid to cut back on your training volume on the days that you feel it’s needed. For instance, if you normally do 16 sets of a particular exercise, you can drop to 12 or fewer sets on the days you need to cut back.
You can also benefit from reducing the number of high-intensity sets. That’s because doing more heavier sets can be very taxing on your body, and most people don’t realize this. When your body is taxed in this way, this can end up affecting the quality of work, which could be potentially dangerous for electrical contractors and other contractors that need to focus and concentrate on their work. So while lifting comes with many benefits, keep in mind that it can make it harder for your body to recover. It’s best to not only reduce the number of sets you do but the intensity as well.
Give Yourself Time to Recover
If you’re a contractor with an active physical lifestyle and a physically demanding job, it’s essential to realize the body can only handle so much. That’s why you should take an entire week off from time to time to give your body a break. This is a crucial component of an effective fitness program. The good news is you don’t have to take a complete week off from the job if you don’t want to. You can still give your body enough time to recover by taking things slow. That means reducing your training volume and intensity and engaging in lighter exercise.
This will allow for your body to recover so that by the time the week is over, you’ll feel better and stronger than before. Remember, it’s not a race where your fitness goals are concerned. Everybody is different, and if you need more time for rest than others, then you should give yourself the time you need to recover. When you feel better, you can pick up where you left off. The danger of not giving yourself time to recover is that the next workout will feel harder than the last, and it may seem like you’re not making any gains.
Get Enough Sleep
The importance of getting enough sleep is well-known. It’s essential advice that applies to all of us. That said, contractors that have a physically demanding schedule should take extra care to ensure they recharge their batteries every night. We all know what happens when a battery gets depleted and doesn’t get charged. Similarly, when the body is running low on vitality, things can get tricky when you try to push yourself to keep up with your job and your active physical workouts. Your body may end up shutting down. You can easily remedy this by making sure you get seven to nine hours of quality shut-eye each day.
After all, if you’re logging in a lot of hours while at work and also finding time to work out, the least you can do is allow your body to recharge its batteries. The amount of sleep you need to function optimally will depend on a variety of factors, such as how physically demanding your job is and your general lifestyle, but usually, you can’t go wrong by getting at least seven hours of sleep per night. There’s no lifehack that can help you get around not having enough sleep. This is just something you have to do if you still want to work, exercise, and feel better. In any case, sleep deprivation is not good as it can make you inefficient, and it also affects the quality of your work.
Be Flexible About Training Times
If you’re looking to improve your fitness as a contractor with a physically demanding job, keep in mind there are no hard and fast rules. For instance, there are no set rules on the best times to work out. You just have to have a flexible approach and find out what works for you. Start by considering different workout times and the pros and cons of working out at set times. Some people prefer to exercise in the early morning before they get into the rush of work. The biggest advantage of this is it allows you to start your morning on a good note with a sense of accomplishment.
It also leaves you with your evening free. However, it also means working out earlier than usual. On the other hand, working out at the end of the day means you have plenty of time to finish your workout, though you might feel too tired and end up not working out at all. To find out the best training time for your body, try it at different times of the day and observe how your body responds. You can even switch up your workout schedule and end up working out at different times on different days. Flexibility is the key to remaining consistent with your active physical goals.
Focus on Improving Your Nutrition
Contractors work hard, so they need the best nutrition they can get. If you’re a siding contractor or concrete contractor who’s always out and about, your diet needs to be on point by incorporating plenty of calories. How else can you get the energy to work out after a long day at work? Therefore, start by making sure you’re eating enough calories based on your height, age, and the amount of strenuous work you do. If you need a lot of calories, it can be difficult to get them in all. So, high-calorie foods should be your best friends. Otherwise, if you underestimate your energy expenditure, you’ll constantly feel worn out and wonder why you can’t gain any mass or muscles.
On the other hand, this doesn’t mean you get a free pass to eat as much as you want. The last thing you want is to gain fat, which can be tough to carry around with you. Ideally, your diet should include healthy fats and slow-digesting carbs and protein. Avoid eating too much junk food because it doesn’t provide your body with the nutrition it needs. Most importantly, don’t forget to stay hydrated, as this can help you feel more alert, focused, and energetic.
Experiment Until You Find the Right Balance
Working a physically demanding job as a roofing or siding contractor for 8-10 hours and going to the gym can be hard to adjust to. You’re feeling tired, and you miss the old days when you weren’t working towards some lofty fitness goal. Realize that you may need some time to find the right balance and to keep the momentum going. All you need to do is keep experimenting until you find the approach that works best for you. The goal is to find a frequency and intensity that’s optimal for you.
At the end of the day, you want to get to the gym and feel that everything is just right. To find the balance you need, start by doing your workouts as normal and then observe how your body feels after each workout. Some scenarios may not play out well, and when you make the necessary tweaks, you should be able to eventually find the right balance of training volume, intensity, and frequency.
Focus On Your Core, Muscles, and Heart
The right active physical workouts should focus on your core muscles and heart. When strengthening your core, you’re targeting your abdominals, obliques, hip flexors, lower back, and the glute muscles. By strengthening these areas of your body, you benefit while on the job because your body relies on core strength to perform a wide variety of activities, such as bending, pulling, pushing, and twisting. Having a strong core also helps prevent back injuries that result in chronic back pain.
Simple exercises that help strengthen your core include the plank, superman, and back bridge, although yoga and pilates also help. You should also incorporate at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week or 74 minutes of vigorous exercise to improve your heart health, whether you’re walking, swimming, cycling, or using cardio machines. Last but not least, strength or resistance training is also necessary to develop and strengthen your muscles.
Expect Days When You’ll Struggle
When life gets in the way, striving toward your goals can feel overwhelming. You need to anticipate that there will be days when things won’t flow smoothly. It’s all part of the process, so soldier on and get it done. Eventually, you’ll get back into the swing of things where you can balance your active physical workouts with your equally active job. Some days won’t be easy, but the best thing to do is get through them and stay on track.
Truth be told, if you’re a contractor, you’ll have a tough time balancing your active physical job This is especially true if there’s a shortage of experienced trade people in your field. If you’re running an established business, you can find many people seeking out your services. With such a busy lifestyle, it’s easy to put exercise on the back burner. Fortunately, applying these tips can help turn the situation around for you. Once you realize the benefits of working out, even if you have a physically demanding job, all you have to do is take small and consistent steps to improve your fitness and lead a more active physical lifestyle.
