Dana Škorpilová: 4 pillars of a healthy lifestyle

Dana Škorpilová is a personal fitness trainer, nutrition coach and co-owner of the Running School she runs with her husband, the well-known ultramarathon runner Miloš Škorpil. She is probably the most pronounced advocate of a healthy lifestyle of her generation and one of the most prominent female role models of today. And there is no doubt she understands the human body and knows how to work with it. Just look at her, you would never guess her age.

Dana is a lady, so the date of birth will not appear in this article. Finding it out is not hard, though. Dana does not hide it from her fans either on social media or in the many interviews she gives to prestigious magazines covering training, diet and health, in short a healthy lifestyle. For us she summed up her advice in four pillars and added one more piece of advice at the end.

PILLAR 1, FOOD

„Imagine your body as a car. When you put in good fuel, it runs well, takes you where you need to go, serves you properly. When we put in bad fuel, it stalls, seizes up, stops working. With the human body it is similar. With good fuel it performs well, functions properly, and on top of that it looks good.

By good fuel we do not necessarily mean a diet or a lot of foods that we cut out of our menu. For instance, every day I have a normal lunch. I eat everything, soup, any main course and a square of chocolate or a piece of cake as dessert with my coffee. With that food I also achieved my biggest success of the year, the transformation, 9 kg of fat in 3 months.”

„Together with those lunches I had of course well-thought-out breakfasts, snacks and dinners. I follow a food style called IIFYM (if it fits in your macros). I have set values for macronutrients every day. Now that I am not in a preparation phase, there is of course more of it. The important thing is to set protein, fat and carbohydrate properly.

With carbohydrates you then manipulate things in the second phase, daily intake swings from a notional zero to larger amounts. Simply one day low, the next day high. The body cannot get used to that and burns hot. It stores nothing, uses everything as fuel.

I also stick to an important rule: I try to use raw ingredients when preparing meals. I do not buy ready-made meals or various semi-finished products, I cook breakfasts and dinners too. The important thing is not to consume, or to severely limit, highly processed foods, those products sealed in plastic with masses of unnecessary preservatives, colourings and other additives, and to round out your menu with vegetables and fruit. You keep yourself fresh when you eat fresh food.”

PILLAR 2, MOVEMENT

„The older a person is, the more they should train and build strength. People often say they trained when they were young and they do not train any more because it is no longer appropriate. It is the exact opposite! As young people we do not need it as much because we have the muscle naturally. With each year, however, we lose muscle mass, and with age progressively, so we should train more in order to keep it.

A specific group is women after menopause. They should definitely train and with load, in order to strengthen muscles and through them stimulate bones to be stronger. When we have strong muscles, the bones have to adapt too, because as muscles atrophy, bones thin.

And how to train? Take advice from someone who knows what they are doing, go to the gym, stretch resistance bands at home, train at home, outdoors… whichever way suits you.

When someone does not know how to start, my advice is: start with the most natural movement, start walking more. I am going to work, I get off the stop earlier and walk. I drive a car, I do not have to park right at the door, I stop a bit further. In the morning, for instance, I get up 20 minutes earlier and go for a walk. This simple thing can change life by 100 %, because I am already starting the day by having done something for myself, breathed in fresh air and gotten oxygen into my body in daylight.”

PILLAR 3, REST

„One of the best and cheapest anti-ageing tools is sleep. But we generally rest too little and sleep too little. And when we do sleep, we sleep poorly. Today we are surrounded everywhere by so-called blue light. From monitors, phone screens, at home, at work, we are constantly under blue light, we have problems with melatonin levels, which lull us into sleep and allow us to properly relax in it.

People used to be outside all day, working in daylight. Then they came home and lit candles. The difference is enormous, tens of thousands of lux, but that is why people used to have perfectly functioning rest rhythms.

Today people do the work they do, computers, fluorescent lights, little light inside, hardly any time outside. The body does not get the cue to rest, to fully devote itself to restoring its reserves. So the solution is to be outdoors whenever possible, at home not to have white but yellow light, set the phone to red-light mode in the evening and stay away from any screen for at least 90 minutes before sleep.”

PILLAR 4, STRESS MANAGEMENT

„It is similar to light, people used to be accustomed to a completely different stress level. Now we are under stress more and more often, it is turning into a really big problem that is very important and, unfortunately, still very underestimated.

People keep asking me how it is possible that I look noticeably better than 5 or 10 years ago. I attribute it to the fact that I left a stressful job, slowed the rhythm of life and devote more time to movement and being outside in the fresh air.”

This topic is very broad, extensive and interesting, just like Dana's personal story. If you would like to learn more about it, take a look at the interview we did with Dana last year.

FINAL SUMMARY, HOW TO DO IT?

„Reduce the share of highly industrially processed food in your diet. Lean more on fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, nuts, basic ingredients. Prepare as much as you can at home, so hunger does not catch you off guard and end (heaven forbid) in fast food. Increase the share of natural foods in your diet, reduce the share of industrially processed foods. Train, move, rest.

Inspiration and motivation are also important. For inspiration we fortunately have social media, we can follow a lot of great people and role models. And motivation is just as important, to such a degree that it is a chapter in itself. I talk about it in one of my most successful blog articles.

It is important to share information. Communicate with others, support each other. After this year's win in the transformation competition, on request from the girls who follow me, I experimentally tried a new concept, a „weekend just for big girls“. Many of them stopped looking after themselves. That is children, family, building a career, and they forget about themselves. These weekends are about wanting to advise the girls how to change their approach and their body the way I changed mine. Of course it will not happen in a weekend, but they get lots of advice and information on how to do it.”