Daily movement and purposeful exercise are both needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

This may come as a bit of a surprise but you need to move daily AND engage in purposeful exercise regularly.  Doing one doesn’t eliminate the need for the other.

Daily movement which includes housework, playing with your kids, running errands, gardening, cooking, and even just standing is necessary for disease prevention and to keep your muscles and bones strong.  So how much daily movement do you need?  Well, in a week, you should be moving for many hours.  If you sit all day, get up for a few minutes and walk around every hour but it is important to limit your sitting to seven hours or less per day.

In addition to daily movement, purposeful and challenging exercise is necessary to make SIGNIFICANT physiological changes including increased muscle strength and mass, increased cardiovascular function, and chronic disease and injury prevention.  Strength train at least twice per week hitting all of the major muscle groups and perform cardiovascular exercise for 150 minutes per week at a moderate to hard effort.  This translates to about 30 minutes a day of exercise.

Interestingly, even if you do purposefull exercise daily but you sit all day, the exercise that you did does not reverse the effects of sitting.  So if you have to sit more than 7 hours in a day, movement breaks are needed as well.

So how do you incorporate movement and exercise into your day?  Scheduling workouts and setting a timer to move every 50-60 minutes breaks up the sitting and allows your body to get the blood pumping and oxygen flowing.

If you need help with accountability, knowing what to do for exercise or just to get moving, we are always here to help!