Most of my clients train hard. Two or three sessions a week, an hour each. Then they sit for nine hours a day.
The session matters. But your body also notices what happens in between, and for most of us that’s a chair. So here are five small habits for the rest of the day.
1. Break up the sitting.
Every 30 to 60 minutes, get up for 2 to 5 minutes. Walk to the kitchen, take the stairs, take a call standing up. Short breaks like these help your body handle the meal you’ve just eaten, and they add up across a day.
2. Walk in intervals.
Three minutes brisk, three minutes easy. Repeat three to five times. Brisk means you can talk in short sentences but wouldn’t want to sing. Interval walking was developed and tested by university researchers in Japan, and in their trials it built more leg strength and fitness than walking at one steady pace.
Start with three rounds, three days a week. Build towards five rounds, four days a week, over a couple of months.
3. Hang for a moment.
Find a bar in the park or fit a doorway bar at home. Keep your feet on the floor or a step at first, so your arms only take some of your weight. Ten to twenty seconds, a few times a day. If your shoulder complains, stop and ask me first.
4. Spend time on the floor.
Sit cross-legged while you read, kneel while you stretch, or sink into a squat holding a door frame. Never force the depth. Five minutes in the evening is enough to start, and it’s a different shape from the chair you’ve been in all day.
5. Learn something new.
Own a move first. Once it feels easy, link it to another. Then try something you can’t do yet. Your body stays capable when you keep giving it something new to learn, not just more of the same.
None of this replaces your training. It’s what makes the training count.
If you have a heart, blood pressure or joint condition, check with your GP or with me before adding brisk walking or hanging.
Roland