Starting a fitness routine has some amazing benefits. If you workout consistently, you can shred fat, lose weight, prevent injury, improve strength and reshape your body. But, can exercising regularly actually help your career?
The amazing answer is yes, it can. Here’s how:
Improving Your Fitness Reduces Stress
If you’ve spent more than a minute at a job, you know stress is part of your routine. Unless you’re one of the lucky few, you have meetings, deadlines, commutes and hefty workloads that plague your day. All that stress can lead to poor work performance, illness, burnout, and turnover. That’s bad news for your boss and your career.
Fitness can help. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, regular exercise can counteract the negative impact of stress, as well as release endorphins in your brain to make you feel peaceful and relaxed. Working out can also reduce tension and stabilize your mood. The result, you’re able to perform better at work and cope with stress more effectively each day.
A Fitness Routine Improves Your Goal Setting Skills
Finding success with a fitness routine comes down to setting and achieving goals. When you set S.M.A.R.T. goals, (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely), you improve your chances of staying motivated and improving your fitness.
This positive impact of goal setting works just as well in the workplace. As in fitness, goal setting helps you stay focused, motivated and on track in the office. Setting small goals helps you to break up larger tasks into smaller components. As you meet each benchmark along the way, you get closer to obtaining your ultimate goal. You become more efficient and effective at your job. Your company could save a lot of money on training classes and motivational speakers if you applied this one simple principle.
When You Exercise Daily, You Sleep Better
You know how your workday goes when you haven’t slept well. Everything is annoying. You’ve had three cups of coffee before lunch, but they just aren’t cutting it. Even small things tend to irritate you. You have trouble focusing and you don’t do your best work. All you want to do is go home and crash.
If you aren’t sleeping well, maybe you should exercise more. A recent article by Sleep.org points out that regular exercise can help you fall asleep more quickly, sleep more soundly and wake up feeling more refreshed. People who are active also are less likely to develop sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome. Just think about it. How much more effective could you be at work if you felt great every day following a solid night’s sleep?
Fitness Leads to Greater Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is the belief that you can accomplish tasks. The feeling that when you apply yourself, you can get results. In the world of fitness, this feeling comes from working hard and seeing the impact on your health. If you lack self-efficacy, you feel like you are at the mercy of outside forces, and that nothing you do will make a difference.
For your career, a sense of self-efficacy means that you aren’t scared to take on new challenges. You gladly volunteer for the next career-changing project, confident that you will succeed. You’re proactive, and meet challenges head-on. You become a mover, and people will notice.
Improved Fitness Could Lead to a Promotion
Here’s where the big career payoff happens. All the benefits listed above come together. You’re positive, energetic, confident and productive. You handle stress easily and gladly take control of challenging situations.
You’re a superstar, and you’re bound to get noticed. And when that happens, you get promoted. More money, more freedom, more control and greater career satisfaction are yours… And you have your fitness routine to thank.
Improve your fitness, launch your career.
It takes hard work and consistency in the gym and at your office. But if you stick with your health and fitness routine, it will help you rise to the next level. As a bonus, you’ll also have more fun and less stress while you’re at it.