| Your Health: | | | | | | |  | Exercise for Health |
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| | Making Time for Exercise | | | There’s no such thing as no time for exercise. We can all make a little room in our lives to be more active, and it doesn’t have to mean running marathons or swimming twenty lengths at the local pool. There are ways in our everyday lives that can help us all to be more active and we should always be on the lookout for ways to help us add more activity into our lifestyles without taking up too much time.
We all know that we should get off the bus a stop earlier, but does anyone actually do this? Chances are you’ll be weighed down with shopping or it will be lashing rain on your journey home, so the last thing on your mind is getting off a stop early to increase your daily activity. |
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| | | But stop and think about what that early stop could actually do for you. If that stop is half a mile from your house and you get off the bus early three times a week (leaving two days for rain and shopping!), that adds up an extra 6 miles walked per month, which adds up to an extra 72 miles per year. That’s equivalent of just over two and a half marathons! So you don’t have to be in a certain city on a certain day to complete a marathon – we complete them all the time without even realising!
| | | | Taking the stairs instead of the escalator or lift adds up as well. When we climb stairs, we lift our entire body weight with us, so it’s much more intense than walking – or standing in a lift or on an escalator! Imagine trying to lift your own body weight – I’ll bet you never thought you could do it, but most of us do it everyday, several times over. Feels like an achievement now, doesn’t it! | | | | And what about jobs we do around the house everyday? On average, 10 minutes of housework can burn 35 calories – that’s 210 calories in an hour. Not bad going! If you add ironing into the mix, you’ll burn a further 20 calories for every 10 minutes of ironing you do. So next time you’re groaning about the pile of wrinkly clothes that’s stacking up, think about how tackling them will actually be good for you! Gardening is even more intense, burning approximately 58 calories for every 10 minutes you do, and most keen gardeners can easily while away a couple of hours digging, hoeing, planting, weeding and cutting of a sunny afternoon, burning nearly 700 calories in the process! | | | So even if you think you don’t have time for exercise, you are actually exercising everyday in one form or another. However, it’s important to try to make time for extra exercise in order to help keep our hearts in good working order and keep our weight in check. It’s the people who combine a healthy diet and exercise who are the most successful at losing weight. You may be vaguely aware of a recommendation to exercise for at least 30 minutes, at least 3 times a week. But experts are now starting to think that this might not be enough for optimal health. They seem to think we should really be trying to exercise for at least 30 minutes everyday. “Who has time to exercise everyday?” I hear you exclaiming. And I agree wholeheartedly. There aren’t many people who would be able to set aside at least half an hour a day for exercise, without getting up at the crack of dawn or exercising into the small hours. So how are we supposed to meet these recommendations? Well, I suppose we can start by counting up the exercise we already do without realising – like the examples I’ve given above. Then we can start to look for other ways to be even more active without actually going to a gym.
My top tip is to invest in a pedometer. These little machines clip onto your belt or waistband and measure every step that you take during the day. Most of us will reach at least 6000 steps per day without even trying, through our daily activities. Everyone will be different, so wear your pedometer for a few days and find your daily average. Then you can set yourself a target. So if your daily average is 7000, aim to complete 8000 steps each day for a week. You’ll be amazed at how motivating this little piece of equipment will be, because you will want to reach that target, and to do that, you will get off the bus earlier, you’ll walk to the shop for milk instead of driving or sending one of the kids, you’ll get up to refill your water glass as soon as it’s empty instead of waiting until you feel thirsty. If you don’t believe me, just clip it on and see what lengths you will go to in order to reach your target! Once you’ve reached that target for about a week, you can increase your target gradually. Challenging your body like this continually will mean it doesn’t have a chance to get used to the activity and it will help to boost your metabolism.
What are you waiting for? Get moving!
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