Adding Exercise and Movement Into Your Daily Routine Can Reset Your Wellbeing.
No doubt about it, modern-day living has made our lives way easier. Technology and modern conveniences are life-changing in some ways (how easy is it to ask Alexa to put on our favorite music or to push a button to raise or lower our car windows??). The down side to all of this, unfortunately, is that as a society, we have become much more sedentary. Think about how much time is spent in front of a computer (or other type of screen) in a day…this has become a bittersweet evolution in technology for us as humans…bitter because we can no longer live without them, but also sweet because it has proven to be invaluable for efficiency of systems and communication!
One of the goals I have for writing this post is to encourage more people to move in ways that are healthy for the human body. Another outcome I wish for is to challenge the reader to be open-minded, curious, and creative in the ways you define “exercise” in your daily routine.
The benefits to moving our bodies and getting exercise are bountiful. In the short-term, we experience improved thinking and attention, we may be in a better mood after, it can decrease our anxiety, and we will sleep better at night. In the long-term, we can lower our risk of depression, dementia, and some forms of cancer. We can improve our balance and coordination, lessening our risk of falls as we age. We can lower our risk for heart disease, stroke, and type-2 diabetes. We can improve our bone density. We can manage our weight. So much good stuff.
For some people the word “exercise” just sounds daunting. It’s like the phrase “I have to go to the dentist" (sorry dentists)…most of us don’t love going to the dentist, but we go because our oral health depends on it. But, and here’s the big take-away, exercise can also be things that you enjoy and that don’t really feel like “exercise”! And exercise can be movement that we “have to do” in our day to be functional, like vacuuming, shoveling, climbing stairs…
If you love stereotypical “exercise” for the sake of exercise, have at it! The CDC recommends getting 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity physical activity, such as brisk walking, doubles tennis, pushing a lawnmower on flat ground, water aerobics, or light biking. If you prefer higher-intensity physical activity, then shoot for 75 minutes of soccer, basketball, more vigorous biking, hiking, jogging, shoveling or heavier gardening tasks. While I’m at it, the CDC also recommends adding 2 days of muscle-strengthening activities per week, all muscle groups. This could be in the form of weights, resistance bands, yoga, push ups/sit ups, heavier gardening, or other functional tasks that use weighted objects.
Exercise is so much more than “going to the gym”. Again, I love a good gym workout, but there are so many other ways that “count” as exercise. This is where the curiosity and creativity come into play, because we get to design our own “Movement Diet” each and every day! We get to choose how we want to structure out “diet” to make it the most nourishing, what “nutrients” we want to put into our “diet”, and when we choose to “eat”. That sentence may have been a bit heavy on the analogies, but hopefully it helps make it “edible” (that was bad 😜).
There are so many aspects of our day, “occupations” that we partake in daily, that we can become more mindful in how we approach them. When we are at our workplace, when we are at home, when we are with our families, when we are in our car, when we are at our desks…these are all opportunities to add various types of movement to stretch our muscles, challenge our joints, bear weight through our bones.
Here are some possible examples of ways to add enjoyable movement into the day that would also “count” as exercise:
Walk with a friend before work, or walk to work if you can, get off the train one stop early and walk the rest of the way, walk at lunch, take the stairs.
When working in the kitchen, make more of your meals from scratch to give your hands, fingers, and entire upper extremities more opportunities to work on coordination and muscle building.
Don’t just sit in chairs. Sit on the floor, on surfaces of varying heights, on exercise balls, meditation cushions. Doing so will challenge our muscles and joints in ways that we don’t when sitting at a standard chair or standing.
Play! Do more of the movement that you love! Dancing, playing sports, gardening, yard work, yoga, tai chi, playing with your children on the floor.
If you’re at a computer for work all day, vary your posture and positioning throughout the day. Sit, alter your sitting, cross your leg, cross your other leg, sit at various heights, stand, rotate, twist, bend, stretch, walk to the bathroom/kitchen/water fountain…you get the idea…
Take-home messages after reading this:
The next position is the best position. Staying in the same position for too long puts us at greater risk for injury.
Move your body in the ways that are most meaningful to you and keep moving!
For me, I love soccer, yoga, hiking, walking with friends, my sit/stand desk, sitting on the floor in front of the wood stove with a cup of tea, and I’m definitely fidgety throughout the day! How about you? What does your “Movement Diet” look like? What is your favorite type of exercise/movement?
