This week is all about exercise snacking. It’s a term I heard used on a podcast recently that I really love, and it means having little snacks of exercise. So rather than trying to carve out an hour, maybe at the beginning, the middle, or the end of your day to exercise or feel like you can’t do it justice because you haven’t got an hour. This is more about that principle of ancestral movement of daily life movement, lots of little pockets of movement throughout the day. And you can pepper this if you like or snack on little bites of exercise.
Here are some examples of the ways I do this:
I have a little wobble board. It’s not going to wobble you off balance too much, but essentially, I can stand on it and it will require a bit of stability from my body. I must move my body weight from leg to leg and use a bit of my core to stabilise – it provides a very light form of exercise. And you can do this when you’re on a conference call, in a meeting, when you’re speaking to a colleague, or just while you’re working.
How can you use the wobble board with another piece of kit to ensure that you can work standing up?
A laptop table… this allows me to turn my sitting desk into a standing desk, and then I pair it with the wobble board to get that good range of motion and start to be more active, metabolically active as well.
Another thing I do for exercise snacking is to use a kettlebell. I’ll have it near my desk in my relatively small office, and it just means I can get up, I can do some bicep curls, I can do some squats, and really good compound movements. I can also do some kettlebell swings – there are lots of different forms of exercise with a kettlebell. And that’s something definitely if you work from home or work agilely, you could think about doing, and potentially in your office environment as well.
Start to think about exercise snacking. How much exercise can you work into your every day? And if you are going to the gym, think about doing less potentially, but getting more from that reduced amount of time.
Exercise doesn’t need to take a long time.
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