Wednesday 23 November 2011

Incidental Exercise

I've been thinking about that today - incidental exercise I mean. They're always banging on about it in magazines, and they love to bring out the two clichés: "Take the stairs instead of the lift!" and "Get off the bus a stop early and walk the rest of the way!" If I had a dollar for every time I have read that I'd be a lot richer. (And when I googled images of incidental exercise pretty much the whole first page was pictures of stairs...) I'll admit that most of the time I have skimmed over that and just thought "Yeah, whatever, like that is going to happen."

Well, the stairs instead of lift part isn't really applicable for me because where I work, you have to take the lift - if you take the fire stairs the alarm goes off! I could take the stairs instead of escalator in the food court I walk through every day though. And I have started to walk to the second closest train station in the afternoons, which adds about 5 extra minutes of walking per day. I mean it's not a lot but I'm sure it adds up. That's the whole idea I think, that all those little extra activities you do will make you more active without you really realising.

Also - housework! For me that works up a sweat, especially when vacuuming and when cleaning the bathroom because that really requires scrubbing. My mum is always telling me to do more housework and I suppose that instead of having a bad attitude about it I could turn it around and realise that doing some chores would actually benefit ME.

I should probably view walking the dog as incidental as well - I should see it as something that needs to be done everyday for the health of him, and in turn for the health of me...because maybe if I don't view it as "exercise", but just as something he has to have like food and water, I'll be more likely to do it!

I think the good thing about all these little things is that on days where you haven't done any purposeful activity, it helps to make you feel like you have at least done something and that can really keep you going.

You know, I used to walk 20 minutes to half an hour every school day because I walked to and from school. Now that I don't do that any more I think I should be trying to make up for it by being active in these other small ways.

If anyone has any good "non-exercise" ideas, feel free to let me know!
(Pic from fuzzypc.com)

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