Vegan Fitness
Vegan Fitness is just like fitness for non-vegan people. That’s just the point: Eating meat and other animal proteins is not necessary to building up muscle and achieving a high level of fitness and energy. Not convinced? There are dozens of famous vegan athletes to prove it.
You need to consider and incorporate a balance of cardio-vascular, strength, and flexibility exercises, in addition to a healthy vegan diet, to achieve fitness and health. Having a varied exercise routine is very important to maintain motivation, while consistency and structure is important to achieving results.
Belonging to a sports club provides you with access to a number of different equipment for cardio training, including treadmill, Stairmaster, eliptical machines, and stationery bicycles. Personally, I prefer jogging/running most of all because it burns a lot of calories and you can do it almost anywhere with a minimal amount of investment in equipment or even a gym membership.
For strength training, I use the weight machines at the gym. There are plenty of vegan bodybuilders, too, if you’re into that. Below is one to check out.
Getting Big and Strong on a Vegan Diet
However, you can do a lot with a stability ball at home, too (refer to core workouts below). And for flexibility, try doing Yoga: Sun Salutation every morning.
I’m now in the best physical shape of my life since becoming vegan, running my first full marathon early 2009 and training for my next. I never thought I could do it before. Below is a URL to the marathon training program I used, and I highly recommend it to you for its clarity. There are training programs for half-marathon and beginning runners as well!
Incidentally, although I’ve done cardio training, working out 3-4 times/week for most of my adult life (consistently for the past 10 years at least), my body fat has dropped from 22% since adopting a vegan diet 3 years ago to around 12% now.
Attention Vegan Runners
A couple months ago, I began incorporating the core workouts below from Runner’s World magazine into my workouts on an alternating basis with my cardio training. I’ve made visible progress on my abs! My running has also benefited by faster speed, my balance has improved, and my back seems stronger as well (bye-bye, chiropractor!).
Without a doubt, exercise is important, and I would suggest that exercising an average 4 days week is incredibly beneficial to your physical and mental well-being. But exercise alone can only do so much for you. Think about how many more opportunities you have in a given day to eat than you do to exercise. That’s why adopting a vegan diet is the healthiest thing you’ll ever do.
If you have any questions or doubts along the way, please contact me (william@vegandietadvisor.com). I’m happy to answer any questions you have.
