Boost Your Energy: 7 Tips for Ages 50+

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In today’s video, over-50s specialist physio Will Harlow shows you a science-backed set of tips to help you increase your daily energy levels!

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if you’re over 50 and suffering with low energy then don’t go anywhere because in this video I’m going to show you how to fix it if you don’t know who I am my name is will harow and I’m the over 50s specialist physio here at HT physio INF farum and today I’m going to be giving you seven tips to help you fix low energy so you can get more done and have a better day now low energy is a very common problem for people over 50 and thankfully I’ve got seven Great strategies to help boost your energy and get more out of your day I’m going to share them with you in just a moment but before we dive into it I just wanted to let you know these tips are not going to be suitable for everyone please do get checked out by your healthc care practitioner before you put them into action and if they cause you pain or discomfort just avoid them anyway let’s have a look at the tips now so some of the tips that I’m going to share with you to improve your energy are backed up by science and research and others are backed up just by my own personal experience so hopefully you’ll find these useful the first tip I’ve got for you is one of the latter it’s just my personal experience and that is to exercise early in the morning if you’re suffering from low energy levels what tends to happen is you get up you feel a bit groggy you start the day you slowly sort of warm up you have a few coffees and then later in the day everything starts to crash at about 3: or 400 p.m. can you relate I definitely could and that is a problem I suffered with several years ago now one of the major things that helped me to improve those symptoms was to get up and immediately go and do a workout now I understand this isn’t suitable for everyone because some people feel very stiff in the mornings but even if you can do a gentle workout in the morning it seems to get the heart rate up it gets the blood pumping around the body and into the muscles and it seems to have a longlasting energy boosting effect throughout the day I don’t believe there’s any science behind it being better to exercise in the morning as long as you’re getting it in it still counts but exercising early in the morning does seem to massively Boost energy levels it did definitely for me so try it at home if you like the next piece of advice I’ve got for you is to have a consistent bedtime and wake up routine now inside the body we’ve got something called the Circadian rhythm which is basically our body’s way of of telling us when it’s time to go to bed and when it’s time to wake up and when it’s time to feel tired and the body Cadian clock relies on us doing the same thing day in and day out but that’s not how most of us live our Lives Many people find that from Monday to Friday they go to bed early and wake up early and then on the weekend they lie in really late and go to bed late as well but the problem is the body gets really confused by this it doesn’t know when bedtime is and when wakeup time is unless we’re doing the same thing every day and you might be finding if you follow this pattern that on Mondays and Tuesdays you feel really tired in the day because your body is used to the weekend Rhythm and it takes it a few days to get back in syn having a consistent sleep and wake up time is the only way to set that circadian clock and keep it consistent and you’ll find that your energy is much more balanced throughout the week if you do this and you have more consistent energy levels throughout the day because your body almost knows when it should be tired and when it should be awake the third tip I’ve got for you for improving your energy levels throughout the day is to delay your first coffee by 90 minutes now coffee acts on the adenosine system in our body or caffeine acts on the adenosine system and the adenosine system is basically a system in the brain that when we get a high buildup of that chemical it causes us to feel tired now caffeine blocks those receptors and stops that tiredness from occurring so that’s great a little bit later in the morning morning and gives us a nice boost but early in the morning the adenosine system hasn’t even started to wake up yet it actually doesn’t become active until about 90 minutes into the day in the first 90 minutes we actually have a higher elevated level of cortisol which is an important hormone to wake us up but it’s also a stress hormone and if you drink coffee you affect the cortisol system and you stop the your energy levels from reaching their normal Peak about mid morning if you have coffee too early now if you ever find that you crash later in the day it might be that you’re drinking your caffeine or your coffee your adenosine is being blocked it doesn’t activate properly cortisol is being blunted and then later on in the day all of those effects stop and you get a massive crash because the coffee has gone from your system and what most people do at that point is they have another coffee and another coffee and it goes on and on and then the caffeine later in the day affects sleep at night so delay your first coffee by 90 minutes let that adenosine system wake up naturally let the cortisol reaction happen naturally as well don’t interfere with it and you’ll have much more consistent energy levels throughout the day before we go any further I just want to tell you about three tip Friday three tip Friday is my weekly email that I send out to my list and it features three of the most interesting things I found that week it could be a health tip it could be a piece of research I’m reading or it could be a new tool that I found to be really useful for helping people get more mobile it’s totally free I just send it out once a week There’s No annoying promos inside and you can sign up for it by going down below this video and entering your email in the three tip Friday link the next tip I’ve got for you to improve your energy levels is to engage in resistance training there is just no better method of exercise for health and muscle and energy and Independence and Mobility than resistance training it’s my favorite form of exercise especially for people over the age of 50 and it’s unfortunately the one that gets engaged in the least by this age group now resistance training bumps your energy levels and your metabolism up when you do it and it stays elevated throughout the day that might be one of the reasons why my morning workouts led to an increase in energy for me throughout the day because I was doing resistance training and that was keeping my metabolism and my energy running High until quite late in the afternoon so resistance training is quite easy to engage in it doesn’t have to be really difficult you don’t need to use massive heavy weights you can use bands and you can use light weights and you can even use your body weight I’ve got loads of videos on my channel to show you how to get started there’s one in the top corner of your screen right now that you can click on which will help you to get going but it’s a great way to boost your energy the fifth tip I’ve got for you to help you maintain better energy throughout the day is to reduce your sugar intake now everyone knows that when we have a sugary snack we get a big boost of energy and then a crash and the problem is most people end up in this boost crash cycle throughout their day they have a sugary breakfast so they get a sugar high for an hour then they crash at about 10:30 they have more sugar at 11:00 brings them back up then they crash again early afternoon and it just goes on and on and on it’s really not a nice way to live your life but so many people do it to keep keep your energy consistent throughout the day we need to be focusing on low sugar foods and some of the best things to eat are foods that are both quite high in protein and high in complex carbohydrates they’ll keep you Fuller for longer and they’ll help you to avoid those horrible crashes that happen when your blood sugar drops too low the next tip I’ve got for you to help you improve your energy levels is to follow the 3 2 1 rule for better sleep now we all know that if you don’t sleep well your energy the next day is going to be affected but not everyone knows some of the best strategies to help them sleep better one of my favorite ways to help me improve my sleep is to follow the 32 1 rule which means that you don’t have any food 3 hours before bed you don’t have any fluids 2 hours before bed and you don’t watch or look at any screens 1 hour before bed now if you follow this rule it really does help to improve the quality and the depth of your sleep the first one the food if you eat too close to bedtime digestion is happening as you’re trying to go to sleep your heart rate is elevated your body temperature is elevated and that significantly interferes with sleep so cutting food early helps to prevent it the second one fluids is very simple if you drink too close to bedtime you’re going to be up in the night needing to pee so we can avoid that by not having fluids too close to bedtime bedtime and the final one one hour of no screens before bed is super important blue light from screens stimulates the receptors in the eyes which make us feel like it’s morning and we should be waking up it almost simulate Sunrise which means that if you turn your phone off 2 minutes before bed and you lie in bed you’re going to be wide awake because you’ve had that blue light stimulating your wakefulness so avoid those three things just before bed and you will sleep better and then have better energy levels the next day and the final tip I’ve got for you to help you improve your energy is to try and increase your step or your stair count now I found this in my own life I was feeling quite sluggish and then it took me wearing one of these and tracking my steps to see I was only doing two to 4,000 steps per day even when I felt like I was doing a really hard day’s work I felt sluggish when I got home but I also wasn’t sleeping that well which fed into a bad pattern the next day quite simply I wasn’t doing enough weightbearing exercise even though I was still going to the gym it wasn’t enough to kind of wear my body down for nighttime which meant I wasn’t well rested and then the following day suffered so one of the best ways to improve that is to increase your step count or do more flights of stairs throughout the day we want to be doing enough walking or stair climbing in the day so that when it gets to the evening we feel pretty tired as if we’ve worked quite hard that day and then that will help us sleep better and the next day you’ll have much more energy as a result so I would highly recommend getting a Tracker I use a Garmin watch I’m not paid to say that but you can use a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or even just one of these little pedometers that you can put on your trousers or shorts and track your steps see how much you do on a normal day then try and increase it by 10 or 20% and see if that in improves your energy levels as a result so those are seven of my best tips to help you fix low energy so you can get more out of your day I hope this video has been useful if you found it helpful please do drop a comment below and let me know your thoughts because I love to read them and if you want to get more from me you can pick up a copy of my book it’s called thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon using the link below it’s got loads more tips and advice like the stuff you found in this video anyway thank you for watching and I’ll see you on the next one