Exercise Mix Up

Physical exercise is a great partner of eating well. When our diets are clean, when we’re getting quality sleep, when our body is functioning properly, when we are getting good amounts of vitamins and minerals, and when we are moving, we tend to feel much better than when we are not doing those things. We’ve talked before about the benefits of shorter exercises and even more natural movements like walking. In this post, Dr. Christianson discusses why simply moving throughout the day is more beneficial than spending an hour at the gym and other ways we can encourage an exercise mix up.

“We have heard so much about exercise being important for us – for stress reduction, our metabolism, endorphin production, our mood and detoxing the body. We hear of all these powerful things it does. What if all that was wrong? What if exercise actually did not achieve those goals for us? There is a new perspective emerging about this.

The new idea is not that exercise helps, but that sitting, without physical activity, hurts you. There is a difference here: If you are totally sedentary for an eight-hour block of time, and then kill it in the gym for an hour, you may not see much benefit. On the other hand, if you even skip the killer gym hour and break up your eight-hour block with some little patterns of movement, you might get even more of all those benefits in less time and with less effort. How cool would that be?

I’ll explain this concept. This sedentary, eight-hour block is pretty much computer time for a lot of us. We are either sitting in the office or at home writing, building content or researching. What if you could look at that eight hours and know you are not really hitting it all the time? You know that during a lot of that time, you are kind of ‘checked out.’ Maybe you are literally ‘checked out,’ doing other activities online, yet for part of those eight hours, you know you are not mentally at your best. So, let’s say for four hours you are doing just great. You are really ‘spot on’ and accomplishing a lot. At least, you’re productive for half the time. What if you could take that four hours and turn it into six productive hours? What if you could have two more hours of super, peak productivity? How cool would that be?”