HH528: Move Your Body Daily

Melissa Deally: 00:00:00

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks. I am Melissa Deally, and I am continuing with my series on 12 easy hacks to better health. And today I want to talk about moving your body daily. Your body was literally made to move. And in fact, prior to the advent of modern transportation, people were walking eight to 10 miles per day, and back in our hunter gather days, it was even further, sometimes 15 miles a day. And now it's so easy to be sedentary, and yet if you shift your mindset, it's also very easy to move your body. You want to aim for roughly 10,000 steps a day, and in fact, doing so is key in in your longevity and being able to have good mobility through your later years in life. And some ways to just get that in that I find really help is I have a walking treadmill and a standing desk, and it's not like the big, expensive standing desk, where the entire desk is a standing desk. I literally bought on Amazon a desk that stands that goes on top of my other desk, and it was like 150 bucks. And then I bought a walking treadmill also on Amazon that it was on sale. I got it for about 150 bucks. And so every day when I'm at my desk, I'm standing, if it's appropriate, I will turn on my walking treadmill and walk for an hour. And then when I'm sitting, I sit on a ball, which also keeps me moving, because I'm kind of bouncing around and moving. And so these are ways that I build movement into my day, even when I'm at my desk. And then on days when I'm not at my desk, then I love to be outside skiing, paddle boarding, hiking, or I'm using my mirror downstairs and doing yoga, doing Pilates, doing step classes, boxing. There's so many things that we can do to move our body, and really, what it comes down to is, what do you enjoy? I love all of these things, and so it doesn't feel like a chore. It doesn't feel like something I have to do. It's something I want to do. And you can figure out the things that you want to do, too. And if you go back and check out a previous podcast with a lady named Janet Olmsted. I'll put the link in the show notes and get her book The playbook. In that book, she has 150 ways to play to give you ideas of ways that you might not have thought of that you enjoy. And one of the tips that she gives is think of what you used to like to do when you were a kid, to move your body. When you were always moving your body, you may find that you still enjoy that. So as I said, aim for 10,000 steps per day. You want to get strength workouts in two to three times a week to support good bone and muscle health. And then you also want to have some stretching in there as well, to improve your flexibility, reduce stress on the muscles from the strength training, etc, and just allow for your movement to be easeful and without aches and pains, etcetera. Stretching is very important, so think about ways that you can move today and and if you like this little health hack, share it with friends and get a group of friends together and move together, because it's even more fun when you move with friends.