I love my fitness tracker. It’s dying though and I am going back and forth between getting a new one or going without. It’s not fancy — it keeps tracks of steps, it sends me happy high fives when I lots of steps in an hour, and it goes cracked when I reach or exceed my goal. I get actually get fireworks when I check the app and see I have exceeded 10k in steps.
These past couple of weeks have been more active than usual, mostly because I started actively cleaning my house after acquiring a bunch of furniture and mementoes from two households over the last two years. Stairs really help I have discovered. Also adding to the step count were multiple trips where I packed and shifted boxes from house to car and from car to donation centres.
It’s also finally summer here where I live and the weather is more than conducive for walks as well as weeding and planning new garden beds.
I learned a couple of things from my tracker — I work in bursts and I prefer to be standing up rather than sitting down. Why does this matter? My day job often finds me sitting at a desk. The exceptions are when I teach or when I facilitate groups. I have tried standing desks and they don’t work for me, likely because I am standing in the same place vs sitting in the same place.
My next experiment in intentional movement is applying the lessons I learned with the Pomodoro technique — where you work for 20 minutes, then take a five-minute break — to see how I can do my work and get some activity. Rather than check my email or grab a cup of tea in that five-minute break, I’m going to add some stretches, some stair climbing, or weeding in those five minutes. A friend has recommended I pick a 20-minute segment where I deal with emails as part of my work schedule, and the key words there are “deal with” instead of just skimming them in that five-minute window.
What types of hacks are you trying to get more movement in your day? Let us know in the comments.
MarthaFitat55 lives and works in St. John’s. In the past, she has rowed, yoga’d, swum, and run. These days, she likes to spend her gym time picking up heavy things and putting them down again.
