How to be More Active
Being active is an important part of maintaining your physical and mental health. It’s been shown that regular physical activity can help to reduce the risk of developing certain medical conditions, such as heart disease. It can also aid your mental wellbeing, with it being said that exercise can help with depression.
Regular exercise is one of those things that we all know we should be doing, but so many of us don’t actually do it. It’s up there with healthy eating; again we know how to eat healthily, but for some reason it doesn’t actually happen with a lot of people.
Being active doesn’t mean that you have to exercise for hours every day, run a marathon, complete a triathlon, or some other major exercise. The smaller ways of being active are just as important and will help you to maintain a healthy lifestyle, boost your mental wellbeing, aid your fitness, stay strong and manage your weight.
Other forms of exercise could be:
• Going for a walk
• Joining an exercise class
• Riding your bike
• Putting on music and dancing
• Watching a workout DVD
• Gardening
• Doing housework
Yes, even housework is a form of exercise, so you can hoover your house and get your daily exercise in while you do it.
The key is to find an activity that you enjoy doing. For example, if you like dancing you could try putting on some music and having a one person party in your living room. If you enjoy walking then you can make a daily walk part of your routine.
Mixing up your activities can help too. For example, you could do housework one day, dance another day, attend an exercise class on a different day, etc. This helps to break the monotony of a single activity, avoids boredom and keeps you interested in being active.
One important consideration is that when you decide how you are going to be more active, you ease yourself into it. If you haven’t exercised for a long time, it may be painful when you get going. So, ease yourself into exercising. Start small and build up your strength and stamina. Start with ten minutes of exercise, or even less if that’s what you are able to manage and work your way up from there.
Once you have done that, the aim should be to exercise for 30 minutes each day. This is an achievable goal for most people but do take your time and work your way up to it.
A common concern about exercising is that it involves expensive gym memberships or equipment. While it is possible to spend a small fortune on having an active lifestyle, it actually doesn’t need to cost anything. Running or going for a walk doesn’t cost anything. Doing housework isn’t going to cost much, and neither will dancing at home to some music.
Exercise can be fun AND free. So, what’s stopping you?
