After workout don't do this 6 things

You just finished an awesome and sweaty workout – great job! But working out is just a small component of a healthy lifestyle and your efforts could easily be sabotaged if you’re not making smart and healthy decisions after your workout is done.

Do you have a healthy post-workout routine that is fostering the results you want? Or are you giving yourself too much  credit for completing a workout and thinking that nothing else matters as long as you got your workout in? Working out is part of a healthy lifestyle and you’ll get the results you want when you are consistent and smart in your approach.

Never make these mistakes after a workout:

1. Forget to hydrate

Most people are walking around chronically dehydrated. You should be drinking water constantly. How much? Approximately 30-35 ml per kg of body weight per day, plus an extra 500-1000 ml for every hour of exercise. This is especially important if you sweat a lot! Stay hydrated before, during and especially after your workout.

2. Eat an unhealthy calorie bomb

You cannot outtrain a bad diet! The only people that can really get away with eating “whatever they want” are professional athletes. They are training for hours and hours a day and have a metabolism built like a piping-hot furnace. But for the rest of us normal people with normal jobs and lives – what we eat after we work out is really critical to reaching our goals. Give your body easy-to-digest protein and carbohydrates and a little bit of healthy fat so it can start repairing your muscles and replenishing lost nutrients as soon as possible. A great post-workout meal would be these loaded sweet potato skins or this post-workout protein shake(without protein powder!). Choose one of these instead of a giant burger and fries or something else equally as heavy and high in fat.

3. Forget to stretch

I say this time and time again, your warm-up and your cool-down are part of your workout. Your muscles will respond so much better when you treat them well and take the time for post-workout recovery stretching.

4. Not clean your space or rerack your weights (especially if you’re at a gym)

Clean up your area (whether you’re at home or at the gym). Tripping over a weight at home is not fun (I’ve done it!), so be sure to tidy up. But, this is especially important if you’re doing some bodyweight training or weight training at the gym. Please wipe your sweat up off the mat or machine and make sure that you put your weights back where you found them. There’s nothing worse than stepping up to the squat rack and having to unload all the weights from the previous person – be considerate!

5. Think that fitting in a workout means you can be lazy the rest of the day

Just because you worked out doesn’t mean you’re free to just sit around the rest of the day. Make movement a part of your lifestyle and take the stairs, get up from your desk every hour to grab a glass of water, take a walking break instead of a sitting one and get up to talk with a coworker instead of just emailing or messaging them. That extra NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) is really important!

6. Forget to track it or post about it 

Fitness tracking allows you to track your progress along the way! And, you never know who will get motivated to change their life when they see you’ve shared an activity tracked with your Results app or a selfie with your Results group! We know this is not for everyone but perhaps you’ll inspire a friend to lace up their sneakers or try a bodyweight training workout.

Remember these no-go’s the next time you head out (or stay in) for a workout. Our bodies are amazing and you can really get incredible results if you treat it well and make the right post-workout choices.

Do you have anything you want to add to this list? We would love to hear about it in the comments below.