Vegan Fitness
Vegan Fitness is a lot like fitness for non-vegans. 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 plant-based diet (i.e. Engine 2), to achieve fitness and health. Having a varied exercise routine (many experts recommend “changing it up” every 2-3 months) 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 variety of 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 a gym membership that you may not use. Running on a treadmill is certainly easier on your joints, but many people (me included) find it incredibly boring.
For strength training, you can use weight machines at the gym or home gym equipment. 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
That being said, you can do a lot with a stability ball and resistance training at home, too (refer to Core Workouts for runners and Engine 2 Diet links below). And for flexibility, try doing Yoga Sun Salutations every morning (ABC-of-Yoga.com has an easy to follow animated guide).
I’ve purchased several Yoga and Tai-Chi DVDs, and the one I find most useful is Rodney Yee’s “Power Yoga Total Body”. At first, it was really difficult just to keep pace with him, much less do the Yoga poses. I used to dread the “upward bow” (three times in a row was brutal!), but now I actually look forward to it.
If you’re new to Yoga, you may want to start with beginner DVDs instead. Other DVDs have short workouts that can be fit into a 20-minute slot in the morning or evening. Whichever you choose, you’ve just got to give it time to work, and alternate with other kinds of exercises to avoid injury and maintain motivation, too.
Thanks to the combination of regular yoga and running (and of course a plant-based diet), I’m now in the best physical shape of my life, running the Tokyo marathon in early 2009 and training for Honolulu this winter. I never thought I could have done 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! Be sure to allow the time recommended to avoid injuries.
Incidentally, although I had done cardio training, working out 3-4 times/week for most of my adult life (consistently for over 10 years before becoming vegan), my body fat dropped from 22% to around 12% within a few months of going on a pure plant-based diet!
Attention Vegan Runners
Several months back, 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!).
More recently, I’ve started mixing in resistance exercises from Rip Esseltyn’s “The Engine 2 Diet”. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do yourself a favor. But don’t expect it be easy (see my article “Why Engine 2 Diet is ‘The Whole Shebang’”).
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 plant-based diet is the healthiest thing you’ll ever do.
If you have any questions or doubts along the way–be they exercise or diet-related–please contact me (william@vegandietguy.com). I’m happy to answer any questions you have, and help you to achieve your diet and fitness goals.
