For many students, the advent of life at university typifies that stage in their life where participation in sport and exercise declines to almost non-existent levels. Often, the structure afforded by school and college provides the perfect backdrop to stay active, play sport and keep fit amongst friends. However, despite the wide availability of sport and exercise opportunities on most campuses, unfortunately the same cannot be said for university life. Most adults will cite their student years as the primary cause of their adult-onset ‘podge’, often blaming binge drinking, fast food, last-minute cramming, stress and juggling work with university as the root causes. It’s important to recognise that with a little more thought and an ounce of discipline, it really doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re a student that doesn’t want the above scenario to be your destiny then the following 5 suggestions may just provide you with the necessary inspiration and direction to help you stay fit and healthy during your student years and beyond.

Eat Well
The pareto principle, which is also known as the 80-20 rule, states that for most events, around 80% of the effects are borne from 20% of the causes. This is especially true when it comes to diet and nutrition.

If the body’s internal biochemistry isn’t right then the effects of exercise will actually have a detrimental effect on health. The first time you will become aware of this is when your immune system is flattened and you get stuck down by a cold, or worse, the flu. Like exercise, the effects of poor nutrition are interpreted by the body as stress. This stress is combined with other environmental stressors (e.g. study demands, relationships, financial strain) and causes those stressful hormones like cortisol to rise exponentially.

Before you start any programme of exercise, take your time to plan and research what you will eat and when. Stay hydrated, ideally with water, and eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. You don’t need to become a personal trainer or nutritionist to learn to eat well. The Government’s Eatwell Guide is a great place to start to broaden your knowledge of what it takes to eat right.  

Stay Mindful
Most people think that exercise is about burning calories and busting a gut – while this is one approach, exercise doesn’t just have to be about energy expenditure and weight control. In a world where people are over-stimulated and stress is rife, ‘working in’ is as important as ‘working out’.

Mindfulness based activities can include all manner of activities and tasks to increase awareness about the body’s energy level, physiological state and level of stress and tension. They can include meditation, keeping a journal, breathing techniques and a wide-range of other activities that direct mental and physical energy internally.

Yoga and Pilates are often great group-based activities to start to raise your awareness about mindfulness-based activities. There are also any number of mindfulness-based apps available to help raise awareness.

There are a wide-range of studies that have been completed in recent years that have demonstrated the positive effects of mindfulness-based education. These lessons and techniques help to calm the mind and body, reducing stress and increasing the potential to engage with learning. Most forward-thinking universities now run their own mindfulness programmes as enrichment and so it’s likely that student services will be able to give you more information on what is available at your university.

Step-Up
The modern sedentary lifestyles have created epidemic levels of overweight and obese people at all stages in life. However, it is important to recognise that this phenomenon has not occurred because people don’t go to the gym enough, it’s happened because people aren’t active frequently enough!

It is entirely possible to exercise daily and still be unhealthy, especially if the body’s nutritional needs are not being met. Being active at regular intervals throughout the day is far more beneficial than being largely sedentary, then doing a daily cardio blast to boost your aerobic fitness levels.

The general advice is to avoid wherever possible prolonged sitting and to actively explore ways to increase physical activity profiles throughout the day. With this in mind, focusing on steps per day is a useful strategy because it is something that can be easily measured with a smartphone app, and can be modified in the moment if you are behind you target. Some really simple steps you can take to increase your daily steps include getting off the bus or tram a stop or two earlier, taking the stairs rather than the loft or escalator, and if you are a student lucky enough to drive, parking further away from the entrance so you have to walk further. With these 3 simple techniques, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to step up your physical activity profile.

Stay Strong
The perils of physical inactivity have been highlighted sufficiently above, but it’s worth acknowledging that a student life can be a very sedentary life if sufficient consideration isn’t given to staying active. Prolonged sitting during lectures, reading textbooks and writing assignments all involve very little bodily movement and these seated postures can take their toll on the musculoskeletal system. Neck, shoulder, low back and wrist pain are common amongst student populations because the body just isn’t designed to be seated for such long periods of time. The micro wrist and finger motions involved with writing and typing also often give rise to ailments like carpal-tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain-type injuries.

Increasing the strength of key postural muscles and raising awareness of good posture and alignment while seated, either in a lecture or at a PC are great ways to reduce the risks of these ailments, and in doing so you will save yourself a lot of pain and unnecessary expenditure on physiotherapy. Pilates and Yoga can again help to raise awareness about these aspects while also developing whole-body strength, mobility and flexibility. Developing strength without length is unlikely to serve a student well given the length of time that they will spend being sedentary. This is only likely to compound muscle imbalances and lead to further injury, pain and dysfunction.

Sleep on It
As we reach the terminal end of this article on staying fit and healthy  in your student years you are probably surprised to see that sleeping is our last focus area and that exercise and physical activity has been a lesser focus of the Article. If we could reinforce only one key message in this article it would be that exercise is a form of stress and if other areas of a person’s life are not in balance, then this stress will spill over to other aspects of health and will have an adverse effect. If therefore you are not getting your 7-8 hours daily quota then it won’t be long before you are literally running on empty from a mental and emotional perspective.

Most health authorities suggest that we should accumulate between 6-8 hours of Z’s per day this is actually a quite a broad and sweeping recommendation. Some people function better on less sleep while others operate better on more. It is certainly worth experimenting with a 7-day sleep diary to establish what your optimum sleep range is. If you feel tired when you wake, you’ve either had too little or too much sleep. Make a note and then try to get more or less the next night (as appropriate) and compare how you feel to your previous night. It wont take long until you learn exactly how much sleep you need to function well. This should be as important a daily goal as your 10,000 steps per day.

Sleep quality is as important as sleep quantity because it’s entirely possible to wake in a morning after having what should be an adequate amount of sleep and feel exhausted. Dietary factors like caffeine and sugar can cause sleep to be disturbed, as can eating large meals too late in the evening. That kebab on the way home from a night out might not always be a good idea! Make a note of the foods you are eating in your diary before you go to bed to see if you can spot patterns between what you eat, when you eat and how you sleep.

Remember, stress is stress, whether it is physical (from exercise, lack of sleep), environmental (temperature), emotional (relationships, finances, workload), nutritional (from poor diet and of lack of hydration), the effects accumulate and adversely affect health and fitness. If you can learn to listen to your body and to make subtle adjustments as required, before long you’ll start to experience a renewed sense of energy and vitality you’ve never experienced before.

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