I’m pretty sure you are always looking for a way to get ahead in your career and business. You might try reading different books on business and success, go to as many seminars and conferences as you can or look to others for inspiration and motivation.

These are definitely all great things that you should be doing but you do have a natural career and success boost available to you right now and it starts with your health.

Let me show you 3 ways how improving your health and fitness can help improve your success:

1. Improve your fitness & you improve your brain power

Unlike Kim Kardashian, when it comes to business, your brain is your money maker. When you need focus, concentration, critical thinking and constant ideas you need your brain working for you and not against you. If you’re looking to boost cognitive function exercise is going to help with this.

For those who exercise they develop the parts of the brain that control thinking and memory more than those who don’t. Research from Harvard shows that not only do you improve thinking and memory you also improve the health of brain cells, grow new blood vessels in the brain and help new brain cells survive and thrive. Exercise helps your brain to run on all cylinders to focus, concentrate and make better decisions.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” – Jim Rohn

2. Exercise helps you to blast through plateaus

I can imagine you’ve had plenty of times where you’ve been stuck trying to develop an idea or move forward with others. This can take the form of things like writers block or not knowing how to tackle a problem in your work or business.

Exercise is a way to bust through those plateaus and get your creative thinking going. It can be as simple as going for a brisk walk, running a few flights of stairs, go to the best Bowflex home gyms or just pound out a bunch of pushups. You just want to get moving!

The research backs this up as well, The American Psychology Association looked at this issue between those who chose to sit and those who got up and moved and the active groups showed more creative responses at least 81% of the time. This means if you need to create new ideas, or are getting stuck developing other ones, you want to get up and move to get over the hump.

3. Exercise helps to lower your stress levels

Stress is by far one of the biggest detriments facing us in society today. Long term stress leads to many chronic diseases causing serious setbacks in people’s lives. If stress is left unattended it is going to play havoc with your ability to work and get things done. Removing all stress is not going to be possible but it’s more about learning to manage it so you can be more productive and successful. When you exercise your body releases mood-enhancing chemicals and at the same time helps to deplete those stress hormones that are causing so much damage.

We have the ability to manage our stress but it needs to be unlocked by engaging in physical activity. When you do start to exercise regularly you will find yourself better able to relax due to those mood-enhancing chemicals and you probably find that your best work happens when you are relaxed and not overwhelmed.

If you own a business and have people working for you you may be interested in how an employee’s health helps the bottom line. Stress leads to illness and the amount of sick days missed is really taking the economy down a notch. Going back to info from 2012, poor health resulting in missed work is costing the economy $576 billion dollars a year. Of that $576 billion, $227 billion is from lost productivity from missing employees or if they are present they’re not at their best as their illness is still causing them to perform poorly.

“Bodybuilding is much like any other sport. To be successful, you must dedicate yourself 100% to your training, diet and mental approach.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

How much exercise & what type do you need?

Here’s the good news, if you are new to exercise you don’t need to start doing Ironman triathlons or working out for hours a day. The research around exercise and it’s ability to help in your motivation, productivity and success was done with simple walking. It doesn’t take a lot to start reaping the rewards and as far as amount of time needed the sweet spot seems to be are 150 minutes of exercise a week. This can be broken up a few different ways, but it works out to around 30 minutes a day. Certainly very doable.

This is good encouragement to start getting going on some form of exercise, you can know that it won’t overwhelm you but you will be getting those positive effects that can help you with your career and success. Start including walking, hiking, biking, swimming or recreational sports to get that 150 minutes a week. There will be time to get more specific and detailed with training and exercise, for right now you just want to get going.

If you’re already making yourself move, keep doing it! If you haven’t, I think you can see now how taking care of your health and fitness has a great carry over effect that can make your ability to achieve success closer than ever.

Are you improving your health and fitness? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!