Activity Levels Throughout Your Whole Day Matter!

If you exercise throughout your evenings and/or weekends, congratulations this is a terrific habit to be in! You probably have more energy and strength than most of your co-workers and friends. However, is working out for a few hours a week enough to balance the other 23 hours you spend sitting and sleeping? Unfortunately, it’s not.

We’re a Sedentary Society

Many of us sit in the car while driving into work, spend the day sitting at our desks and sit again during the long commute home. For those of you who go to the gym, you guys usually do it on the way home, which is great. When we get home, you guessed it, most of us sit during dinner and then sit down while watching our favourite Netflix shows. Oh, and now it’s time for bed so we change things up by lying down.

Even for you gym goers, that’s a lot of sitting and lying down throughout the waking hours, and not much activity. Well, it turns out that the lack of activity most of us get throughout the entire day, hinders fat loss.

It is important for couch potatoes to increase their movement.

NEAT matters!

NEAT is “non-exercise activity thermogenesis”. It’s the energy we burn through common daily movements including walking, fidgeting, cleaning ourselves, and even making the bed or getting off the couch. When many of us get really focused on a task at work or really into a TV show, we completely stop moving. Therefore, the energy we burn through NEAT goes way down. This drop can mean the difference of 100s of calories burned daily. Many people struggling to lose weight, aren’t moving enough for most of the hours in a day.

The Solution

The best strategy is to walk every hour. Most fitness trackers remind you to get up and move hourly. This reinforcement works so effectively for goal-oriented people. Since I started tracking my steps, I’ve increased my step count by at least 30% daily!

A little extra exercise daily, adds up to mean a lot!

A great way to get more steps into each day is to take advantage of your lunch break. Don’t sit at your computer either working over lunch, or interacting with social media. Get outside; walk to a nearby store you have to run an errand at, or even walk to your car and back a few times. If you can’t get outside or the weather is miserable, walk around inside your office or in a local mall.

Utilize the stairs! Always take the stairs in your office and while shopping. If you don’t have stairs available to you at work, walk all the way up and down your stairs a couple of times as soon as you get home. Climbing stairs is an excellent form of cardio.

Get active at your desk. There are so many exercises you can do right at your desk. Here are a few of the moves I’ve shared with my busy corporate clients.

To Sum it up…

We really are a society that doesn’t move enough. Although it’s terrific to workout at the gym during evenings and weekends, we all need to get more active throughout the whole day. Try walking around the office more; use your lunch hour to get away from your desk and comfy chair and go walking. This is what is going to continue to make a difference for you on your weight loss journey.