A month ago I wrote about creating tiny habits to increase my activity. I chose the word activity on purpose. Lots of times in January, we hear people talking about their fitness goals. I have fitness goals too, but this year I wanted to try something new. Rather than think about fitness as the ultimate goal, I wanted to focus on activity.
My thesaurus defines activity as action, hustle, motion, movement, and my personal favourite, goings-on. Adding more activity means I tend to focus on getting out of my work chair and doing something that requires me to move. These days that means stretching, doing modified mountain climbers and high knees, and going up and down my three flights of steps as many times as I can in a day.
I’ve been tracking steps for a while with my Fitbit, and my objective analysis shows I’ve added 2500 steps a day more with adding an activity when I do three things: get a beverage (coffee or water), get a snack, and go to the washroom.
But there’s more (isn’t there always?). I have a wonky hip joint and it occasionally likes to complain. In December, I was feeling out of alignment. I have a couple of exercises I do when I feel the hip getting cranky, but I wanted a way to check it was still in place. I also brought back what my original trainer called high knees — I march in place bringing my knees up as high as I can. When I first started adding them at random times as part of three tiny habits, the hip was twitchy. Now it is not. Yay tiny habits!
I still have specific fitness goals (increase my deadlift weight by 5% for example) but I’m not going cracked trying to squat in 30 and 60 minute specific fitness sequences daily. What is happening is I am getting in about 30 minutes through five and ten minute slots. Some days I get in more, and that’s a good thing. I’ll keep the current pace until the end of the first quarter, and then we’ll see what’s next.
What are some of your activity hacks that you are trying this year? Let us know in the comments!
I spend about 1 to 3 hours reading blogs daily. Recently, i started walking back and forth in my hallway while reading instead of sitting on the couch. I do that until my feet hurt, and that gives me about 1000 to 4000 extra steps daily
What an excellent idea! Thanks for sharing. I might try that this weekend.