Getting More Exercise 1: Fitting it into your Life

If you could make one change to lose weight, lower cholesterol, improve blood pressure, and prevent diabetes, would you do it? After all, heart disease and diabetes are two leading causes of death in America, and millions are on medications to manage these conditions. So what is this cure?

The answer isn’t an expensive drug but exercise.

That’s right. Exercise can accomplish all of the above, plus build muscle and tone your body, increase blood flow to your brain, strengthen your heart, and sometimes improve sleep quality and relieve stress. Despite this, most of us don’t get the recommended 30-60 minutes of low to moderate exercise 5 or more days per week.

If that sounds daunting, don’t feel intimidated. Chances are you already achieve some of that, and incremental increases towards the minimum have a positive cumulative effect. An extra 5 minutes per day adds up to an additional 30 hours of exercise each year. Think of the benefits over your lifetime!

Aim to get as close to the recommendations, and it’s OK to start slow and build up. It may take awhile to adjust to a new program, but you’ll start finding ways to add in ten minutes here or there.

Part one of this series focuses on ways to fit exercise into your daily life. Part two helps you keep it in your life with tips on making it happen consistently.

MAKE THE TIME

Ideally you’d be able to carve out a daily chunk of time for physical activity. Even if this is not feasible on a daily basis, a couple times a week still brings benefits!

Also, studies have shown that you get equivalent benefits from breaking exercise into smaller chunks – two 15-minute walks are just as effective as one 30-minute walk. Note this means you don’t have to head to the gym for an hour every day to get adequate exercise. In the effort for increased exercise, consistency is key. To find time, ask yourself:

-Where can I find 10-15 minutes daily?

-Do I have more flexibility in the mornings, daytime, or evenings?

-Are there 1-2 days during the week when my schedule is less full? How busy are my weekends? Can I commit to 30 minutes on these days?

-Are there natural breaks that already occur during the day? Lunch is a perfect example, but get creative! Maybe you have a solid morning routine at work and can build in a 15-minute break between tasks.

Once you’ve established a good time think through how you will fill it. Will you be at the gym, on a walk around the block, using your elliptical machine at home? Do you need special equipment or clothing, or to new carpool arrangements? The more you think through the specifics the better prepared you are to carry out your plan.

It may be that some days you manage half an hour of walking and household chores, punctuated by 1-2 days of focused exercise efforts. Others choose to start off the day with a 30-minute walk. Either way, the key is to just start.

HARNESS THE POWER OF MULTITASKING

Short of setting aside time solely devoted to exercise, some prefer to multitask their exercise. For example:

-Exercise while watching TV. This could mean using the bike while watching the news, or some free weights and crunches during commercials of your favorite show.

-Watching a sporting event? Climb up and down the bleachers a couple times during the course of a game. Stand up every time you cheer. Pace the length of a soccer field while watching your child play.

We all have tight schedules and a long list of obligations. Combining exercise with a regular item on your list increases your success in incorporating it into your life.

GET CREATIVE

We all have multiple demands on us, and sometimes exercise can help you manage those demands. Investigate all areas of your life to see if exercise can be part of the solution.

-Find stress building at work as the morning wears on? Step out for a brisk 10 minute stroll to remove yourself from the stress and clear your head.

-On that note, 5 minutes of stretching mid-afternoon fights off drowsiness and refocuses your efforts. After all, a 10-minute bout of productivity can accomplish more than half an hour of half-hearted attempts.

-To mix up the weekend routine suggest a hike with friends instead of the standard “catch up over a meal,” and save money to boot! Or go out dancing, try out the new ice skating rink, etc.

-If the nighttime munchies hit after dinner, take a 20-minute stroll immediately following the meal. Exercise is a moderate appetite suppressant, and staying busy distracts from cravings.

-If you have problems sleeping try ten minutes of relaxing yoga stretches before you sleep.

Is there another area of your life that you’ve wanted to work on? See if you can’t kill two birds with one stone!

ALL THE SMALL DETAILS

Make your daily routine less sedentary. Take the stairs, park further away in the parking lot, use the furthest bathroom from your office. Wear a pedometer to track your efforts and experiment with new ways to fit in more steps. Housework and chores count too. Everything from gardening to washing windows gets you moving and active, so schedule that in regularly.

Finally, take a look what you’re already doing. Is there is a way to increase the activity level further? Use a push lawn mower or forego golf carts in favor of walking. Love to play fetch with your dog? Think about all that time you spend standing around – do squats or bench push ups while she chases, or start her off with a jog around the park, she’ll still get to run but you join in on the action.

Making time for exercise is less difficult than you think. Use any combination of the techniques above, and don’t be afraid to experiment to find the solution that works for you!

In favor of an integrated approach to wellness

In my previous job as a health coach, we were instructed to focus solely on the physical aspects of health and wellness – weight management, improving nutrition, increasing physical activity, stress management [but only the physical aspects like stress management techniques], and smoking cessation. The reason was that staff members simply weren’t trained to deal with the emotional aspects.

While I can’t argue with the rationale behind the policy, it seems a false dichotomy at best. The physical and emotional are intertwined in intricate and subtle ways, and each manifests itself in surprising and unexpected areas of life. A classic example might be emotional eating, where the seeming physical problem of eating too many sweets or junk food stems from a deeper emotional concern. The act of eating is a symptom, a coping mechanism, a red flag. If your attempted solutions do not address the underlying concern of emotional eating, then your efforts will only be partially successful, at best.

Or for those wracked with insomnia and other anxieties around falling asleep and staying asleep, changes to the physical environment can do much to increase relaxation and sleepiness, such as ensuring proper bed temperature and mattress firmness. Altering eating habits and exercise patterns can have beneficial impact on sleep, as well. Thus a seeming emotional issue – anxiety, frustration over low sleep quality, and the corresponding irritability, can also be traced to physical factors.

Thus to treat one without the other is to ignore a powerful set of influences on total health and individual well being. The world moves in vast complex ways, and so too do our daily lives. If we accept that there is a mind-body connection, it follows that this connection should permeate multiple levels of our lives, allowing us to move in vast complex ways as well.