Tired? Tired of being tired? You aren’t alone. There are few human qualities more highly sought than energy. It determines our ability to enjoy life, to attract mates, to finish projects, to protect our families, to shape our bodies effectively, and so much more.
While there are endless specific suggestions about herbs, exercises, meditations, supplements, rest patterns and so forth that I could mention, the most important and over-arching components are relatively simple, and available to anyone with the willingness to begin.
Basically, your energy level will be controlled by three physical and one psychological factor.
A) Fitness. There are a variety of different things that contribute to the quality called “fitness,” but a few of them are specific to energy level.
1) Cardio-vascular fitness. A dead minimum of twenty minutes three times a week, just to stay in the game. If you want to create a swift, powerful change, try forty minutes four times a week. Walking is sufficiently intense, if you stay in the “aerobic zone” which can be described as a level of exertion where you can’t sing, but you can still talk!
2) Body-mass index. Unneeded weight is like a sack of wet cement strapped to your back. It eats up energy like crazy. Regardless of what anyone says or implies, there is only one basic way to lose fat: to change the ratio of calories consumed to calories burned. In general, this requires discipline on BOTH ends. Fat loss is a two-headed snake. If you diet but don’t exercise, your metabolism can slow down to a crawl, denying you success. And if you exercise but don’t eat sensibly, well, a pound of fat has about 3500 calories. An hour of running only burns about 350 calories. Do the math.
3) Flexibility. Often overlooked in the search for energy, flexibility is a measurement of tension in the body. A stiff body is like a car with its brakes on. Think how much gas your car would waste!! That gas is your energy, when you carry unnecessary tension. Most stretching activities are less a matter of “lengthening” muscles, tendons, or ligaments than learning how to communicate with your body, to learn how to breathe into tension.
4) Strength. Contrary to popular belief, strength is more in the mind than the body. It is a matter of leverage, concentration, and controlled excitation even more than it is the “size” of the muscles involved. On a physiological level, it is a matter of the percentage of your muscle fibers you can recruit at a given moment. Weight training, or body-weight exercises like Hindu Pushups and Hindu Squats, are great ways to increase strength, which makes physical tasks much easier and less fatiguing.
B ) Controlling food intake. A critical factor. Note that I didn’t say “diet.” At this point, we all pretty much understand that diets don’t work