Some people say that they hate to exercise, and then they go out and prove it by leading a sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle. But I’m always intrigued by others who claim to hate exercising, but comfortably spend hours doing housework, yard maintenance and gardening, taking walks to shop or spend time with friends in the neighborhood, or go up and down the stairs of their homes multiple times a day.
If that describes you, I have some news. You are exercising! Any type of movement is a form of exercise. Don’t feel guilty about not exercising. Instead, accept it and treat it as exercise and figure out if there are more organized ways of supplementing what you are doing.
Exercise is obviously good for you. It helps you maintain better health, contributes to improved brain functioning, and enhances longevity. If it were easy, more people would do it on a regular basis. If you begin to think of any type of movement as exercise, it becomes easier to think of exercise as being easy.
The problem with not recognizing that movement is exercise is that you might be ignoring certain activities or muscle groups that are necessary for health. If walking is your only form of exercise, it ignores the fact that weight training/resistance activities are necessary for strength and for protection against arthritis. If your primary movement activities are connected to being an avid gardener, you may not do enough walking to derive the cardio-vascular benefits of exercise. And if you get the benefits of upper and lower body activities as well as cardio by doing yardwork, but you live in a colder climate and don’t replace it during the 3-6 months when yardwork is hardly necessary, you are causing your body to decline for almost half of the year.
It behooves all of us to become acquainted with the physical fitness recommendations that have been determined by the CDC, American Heart Association, and other health related organizations. Then see how your movement activities dovetail with those recommendations. You may be surprised to see how much exercise you are doing – and then figure out what types of things you will need to do to supplement your “exercise” regimen. The only thing left to figure out is whether you have to schedule your movement activities on a more regular basis so that you’re not taking a haphazard approach to your health.
When you realize that some of the things that you are doing as part of your normal lifestyle count as exercise, you may find that you don’t hate exercise after all.