“We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change.”
– BJ Fogg, PhD
Achieving weight loss, improving fitness, and bettering health are challenging for many because these goals require consistent long-term changes to typical behavior. The desire to lose weight quickly or build muscle overnight is not physically possible, regardless of what many fitness marketing campaigns may tell you. The body takes time to transform, and altering the behaviors that lead to gaining weight and a lack of fitness takes a great deal of purposeful planning and intentional effort. After achieving health goals, maintaining them requires continuing these new behaviors (such as daily exercise and healthy eating) for life. For this reason, developing lifelong health and fitness through lifestyle changes is the road to successful outcomes, not fad diets and 12-week exercise programs that don’t always provide a long-term plan.
Finding ways to include more physical activity and structured exercise into your lifestyle can be achieved in various ways. There is no secret exercise program that provides 100% success for all, but instead, finding what works best for you and your lifestyle is the best exercise program and crucial to your success. Starting with a small action, such as one push-up after you pee or a quick walk around the block every morning, can be the perfect start toward building a habit of more activity and longer workouts over time. The key to incorporating exercise into your lifestyle is to do something small every day, opposed to something so big and time-consuming that you will not do it.
There are several misnomers about how many days it takes to create a new habit. Some believe it takes 21 days, while others believe it takes 66 days. However, neither one of these timelines guarantees long-term habit formation because time does not dictate a habit. Creating habits is achieved through consistency and making each action a priority in your life. Determining the perfect move in the precise place, so you will complete it over time until the new action becomes automatic (where you don’t think about it anymore) determines how long it takes for a habit to form.
Cultivating habits, similar to tending a garden, takes time and effort, especially initially. When you first plant seeds, they require more water and attention, but once they break ground and begin to grow, your garden becomes easier to manage and maintain. Various plants, like various new behaviors, will grow and take told at different rates. Some habits will get bigger while others will multiply. Some practices will seem easy to do, while others may struggle to take hold. Working with a health coach to implement the best behavior choices and troubleshoot roadblocks is the key to achieving successful lasting health changes. Through consistency, these new behaviors will become automatic and accomplished with less effort than at the beginning and a priority worth scheduling in your life.
BJ Fogg, Ph.D. and Director of Stanford University Behavior Design Lab shares how setting up your environment for success and implementing baby steps is the best way to achieve personal goals. In his New York Times Bestselling book, ** Tiny Habits, he explains how implementing small behaviors can transform your life. And because these behaviors are so small, they become more doable than the “go big or go home” model of personal transformation. The key is to choose a positive action you will do, not design an overwhelming grand plan so big you end up doing nothing.
If you don’t have the time to go to the gym and workout for an hour, here are a few small ways to begin including more intentional exercise into your daily activities:
Make a habit of taking the stairs instead of the elevator and escalator
Make a habit of standing up every hour to move, stretch or walk for a few minutes. You can walk up and down the hall, do a few deep knee bends and push-ups against your desk before going back to work. The practice of getting up every 55 minutes increases blood flow and improves thinking and clarity. If you do not do it for the exercise, do it to be more productive!
Make a habit of parking farther away from the grocery store or shopping center to encourage more walking into your day.
When brushing teeth, do some calf raises or balancing on one foot for one minute, then switch to the other foot the second minute. Once this practice becomes easy to do, find more balancing challenges while brushing teeth, like closing your eyes while standing on one leg.
Schedule 10 minutes and do an exercise circuit or stretching sequence focusing on one body part, such as legs, abs, back, chest, shoulders, or arms.
Before sitting down to watch Television, do ten squats into the chair or couch.
Be active around commercials during tv time, such as holding a plank or walking around the kitchen, living room, or climbing your stairs until the commercial break end.
Sit up and stand up straight, creating feelings of power and confidence. On the flip side, slouching encourages the subconscious sense of hostility, sluggishness, and negativity. YUCK!
Aside from the exercise tips offered above, here are helpful tips from your Living LEAN team:
Melissa’s tips:
Start every day with 10 minutes of intentional exercise. I either do a 10-minute strength workout on the Peloton app or dance hula for 20 minutes. I also plan long walks and hikes with friends a couple of times each week. Every Sunday, I preplan exercise in my daily planner with a hot pink pen which helps me keep daily intentional exercise top of mind.
Darci’s Tips:
Set specific exercise intentions beforehand, including when and where daily exercise will happen. To be more precise, say the following sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on (day) at (time) in (place)”. My practice of setting clear specific intentions the night before makes it happen, even if the plan may change slightly. This 20-minute workout is a “must-do” for me, while walks in the evening after dinner with friends are a bonus.
Kodie’s Tips:
As soon as I get out of bed, I feel pretty stiff, so I like to start my days with mobility movements for my spine which wakes me up pretty good! I plan daily walks with my dog around the neighborhood and do a series of exercise movements after every personal training session. Aside from sprinkling in exercise between client sessions, what helps me the most is choosing a monthly exercise goal and scheduling it into my daily routine.
As you can see, there are multiple ways to include more activity and intentional exercise into your daily routine. The statement, “I don’t have time to exercise,” should not be an excuse to exclude exercise but a challenge for how to sprinkle it throughout the day. Schedule and set aside a short amount of time (10-20 minutes) each day to do something beneficial for your physical, mental, and emotional health and wellness.
How will you become more intentional about including a few minutes of exercise every day? Become proactive, schedule the time, and do the action. This time needs to be prioritized in your life to improve your physical fitness, mobility, and strength and offset typical chronic illness and disease from your future.
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Join us next Sunday to discuss the health benefits of a proactive approach, mindset, and attitude toward life.
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