Happy New Decade! May it be your best one yet 🙂

Let’s start the decade with another way to automate exercise. Engaging in activities where exercise is nothing but a nice byproduct is the most sustainable pathway to healthy levels of fitness. 

In the good old days, people got most of their exercise from their work. Most jobs involved some element of manual labor, forcing people to use their bodies on a regular basis. 

Nowadays most people spend their days stagnant in front of a computer. And this is a major contributor to the massive personal and societal costs of our global lifestyle disease epidemic. 

Move more at work

You may spend most of your working time at a desk, but that doesn’t mean you cannot stand up or walk around. Ideally, you should move a bit every half hour.

Personally, I find this to be a bit too distracting for doing good research. Instead, I have a (surprisingly cheap) activity tracker that starts bugging me if I’ve been stagnant for one hour. 

Here are a couple of good habits to automate a healthy amount of movement into your working day:

• Walk to your colleagues’ offices instead of calling or messaging them. 
• Take regular trips to the water cooler.
• Stand more during meetings and use a whiteboard to explain your thoughts.
• Convince colleagues to take an occasional walking meeting. 
• Commit to taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
• Get out of the office for lunch. 
• Happily help out when the occasional bit of manual labor is required. 

Appreciate your housework

Cooking, cleaning and gardening all involve a considerable amount of movement. It’s easy to see these chores as pure annoyances, but if you view them from the angle of free exercise, they suddenly become more attractive. 

From this mindset, it also becomes possible to extract further benefits by breaking these activities down into smaller daily chunks. Spending 15 minutes on these chores every day is much more manageable than 2 hours once a week or one full day every month. 

So, see if you can build a couple of healthy workplace habits and find some meaning in your mundane household chores. Getting this right represents a big step towards healthy fitness levels. 

See you tomorrow for our final category of automatic exercise activities: morning and evening routines.