As we say goodbye to the holiday season and hello to a new year, it’s time to think about our resolutions and goals for the coming months. With health and self-improvement type resolutions top of the list for most Americans, I am sure most of you, like me, have a fitness-related goal or resolution on your list. And, with 2020 upending most of our routines, a lot of us are starting from scratch. The latter half of 2020 and particularly the holiday season was not very fitness-focused for me. This blog post explores some easy ways I am slowly reintroducing exercise into my everyday routine and working on rebuilding the habit that has been slightly neglected over the last few months. This is not a blog post for fitness aficionados. This is for the people that have spent too much of last year sitting at a desk and haven’t even thought of exercise over the holiday season.
Here are 4 helpful tips to help you reintroduce exercise into your routine.
1. Set a daily step count.
Walking is an excellent type of low impact cardio workout and a great option for building back up your fitness habit. Often the thing that makes working out feel like such a chore is the level of effort it requires. Doing intense exercise when you are not very fit or have not done it in a while is really hard. Walking is a great way to kickstart the exercise habit again without having to work that hard.
Set a daily step count goal to help make walking part of your everyday routine. Many smartphones will have pedometers built-in and if not there are lots of pedometer apps you can download. Using a smartwatch to track your steps is even better as you can wear it all day. Yes, walking to the kitchen to get a coffee counts towards your daily steps!
The target number of steps you should be aiming for will be different for everyone. I would recommend tracking your steps over a few average days, see how many steps on average you take doing everyday activities, and then add 3,000 steps to that number. If you are easily hitting that target, add another 3,000 or 5,000 and so on.
2. Incorporate stretching into your routine – it’s easy!
Stretching is another great low impact exercise that can help slowly and easily build up fitness. Not to mention it feels really good to get in a good stretch, especially if you have been sitting at a desk all day. The best thing about stretching is that it is relatively easy. You are not going to get sweaty or uncomfortable, if you listen to your body and follow curated routines, you are only going to feel good.
Stretching is often overlooked as a form of exercise with most people associating it with warming up or cooling down after more intense forms of exercise. However, not only does stretching help improve your flexibility and range of motion, making other forms of physical activity much easier, but it also helps to improve your posture which helps prevent back pain, increases blood flow which helps increase your energy levels and it can be great for stress relief. If we are stressed we often tense our muscles, particularly in the neck and shoulders, causing everything to feel tight and uncomfortable. Stretching can help to release that tension and reduce stress.
Follow a quick stretch routine in the morning and evening and you will feel more energized and ready to take on more exercise in no time. The Sanctifly app has lots of follow-along stretch routines available to members. These are quick and easy stretches, originally designed for time-conscious travelers, but can be easily adapted into a daily routine. Download the Sanctifly app here to find out more.
3. Make your workday work for you.
Restarting an old habit or building a new one requires time and effort. The best way to get started and to have a better chance of succeeding is to try to fit it into your current daily routine, rather than trying to add it on. For many of us, our workday now consists of staying home and sitting at a computer or on the phone for long hours. While the best version of ourselves might get up an hour early to do a workout or go for a run on our lunch break, that is not the reality, especially post-holiday season. Instead, make your workday work for you! Incorporate some form of physical exercise into your normal daily routine. This could be standing whenever you take a phone call, standing at your desk if possible, or sitting on an exercise ball while at your computer. Replacing your office chair with an exercise ball forces you to engage your core muscles throughout the day and helps to improve your posture. It is often given as advice on how to be more active while at the office and can seem like an easy win that requires little effort. However, that is not completely true, it requires some work. You need to actively engage your core all the time or else it could have some serious negative effects on your back. Check out this great article on the benefits of replacing your office chair with an exercise ball and how to do it properly without risking injury to your back.
4. Make a habit stack to help get back into it.
Habit stacks are great ways to make habits stick. The concept refers to the idea of grouping new habits with old ones to make them easier to stick to. For example, do you love a cup of coffee in the morning? Only have your coffee after you have drunk a glass of water. Do you love listening to podcasts? Only listen when you are out walking or doing something else physical. There is a great article on the Sanctifly blog all about how to build healthy habits and using habit stacks. Read all about it and get some expert tips here.
The start of a new year is a great time to get serious about building healthy habits. There are two main pieces of advice I follow when trying to either restart an old habit or form a new one.
1) Use SMART goals. Create a measurable way to track success. Arbitrary goals such as ‘I want to get fitter’ will never feel as it they have been accomplished. Setting a daily step count is a great example. It is clearly defined, and you know exactly what you need to do to achieve it.
2) Don’t be too hard on yourself! Habits, especially healthy habits, take time to build and effort to keep. The above tips are examples of easy ways to incorporate more exercise into your daily routine and start to build an exercise habit. Nobody can wake up one morning and decide ‘today is the day I am going to run 10K’ or ‘from now on I am going to work out 5 times a week’. Start small and be nice to yourself and you will achieve great things, it may just take a little longer than you had originally imagined.
Do you have any tips or advice for incorporating more movement into your everyday routine? Let us know!
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