Flight Crew Health and Fitness - a healthy lifestyle?

Life above the clouds, is flight crew a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle that is the question?

Let's look at it this way......you are placed in a metal tube closing in on the speed of sound, with just enough room to swing your arms around. The crew food is filling the gash cart or otherwise your filling yourself with the gash crew food, either way these are choices we have to make everyday!

And I've not even started on the 5am report time yet.....anyone for coffee! Sugar and milk? Decisions, decisions and you are still half asleep.

I have worked in the airline industry for nearly a decade now and I am currently a Captain in the UK, flying Domestic and European routes whilst doing my fair share of night stops. With a 90 minute commute to work each way I spend a lot of time on my backside these days, with the addition of crew food this is not a healthy lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination.

HOWEVER....

Through personal experience, research and education (Loughborough University BSc Sports Science), I find myself feeling healthier than I was in my teens and twenties, where I was playing professional and semi-professional football, training up to 2 times a day 6 days a week! I have found ways to reduce illness and injury, feel more alert and awake, mainly through understanding food, nutrition and exercise.

Many health and fitness programmes do not fit the lifestyle of pilots or cabin crew, and the flight crew fitness plans out there are just aimed at fitness. My philosophies are based on health and wellness which will allow you to become "fit" in any form of fitness you choose. The basics are the same.

My idea behind the Flight Crew Health and Fitness blog is to provide you, the flight crew of our skies, the information to help you achieve your health and fitness goals. Whether it's losing a few pounds, training for a marathon, protecting your medical certificate and flying licence, or just making yourself feel better you'll find something here!

If you have any topics in particulars you would like the blog to cover please let me know in the comments below.

Take it easy,

Remember.... Rome was not built in a day

G