The title is of this post is a question I am often ask. We’ve come to think of exercise as something we do on top of living our day to day lives. I’d like to invite you to think of your life itself as exercise. At any given moment, how can you incorporate your body into the action?
It has been shown that for people who sit 6 or more hours a day, no amount of exercise can reverse the damage that being this sedentary does. If you are like me, you might have cringed when you just read that. At first glance it seems like a pretty gloomy statistic considering how many of us are tied to desks. Even children in school are forced to sit more than they are encouraged to move. I often wonder when and why sitting ever became the norm. For our human bodies that are made for action, sitting is hard work.
I watch my son stand as he plays with his toy cars, run around in circles, and dance endlessly. He can’t stop moving. And I don’t want him too (ok, well sometimes I do, but then I remember my core values, take a deep breath, and embrace his maniacal ways…). I guess what I am saying is instead of dreading exercise or thinking of it as just another chore, why not accept it as our natural state? It’s really only only in the last 50 or so years that we’ve become such a sedentary society. For the majority of human existence, we’ve been movers! No wonder why our bodies reject sitting at desks or on couches for hours at a time….we were never meant to!
Maybe, for this next week, see if you can move more than you sit. Not in an “I am now going to perform exercise” type of way but more in an “I am going to move because I desire to” type of way. We can get all specific about how much strength training or cardio or agility training is ideal but the bottom line is the more movement, the better. The gym is a training ground to help us move more gracefully when we are outside of it, but outside of it is were most of life happens. And that is what counts.
We may have been walking 1 mile an hour but it still counts!
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