This Week’s Thrive In Five Is About Movement Snacking
Happy New Year to you. In the UK, we’re in another lockdown, lockdown 3. So I hope that isn’t too depressing for you. What I’m talking about today will help certainly with improving or maintaining good sense of mental health. It’s also really beneficial for your base level of physical wellbeing.
What is Movement Snacking?
Movement snacking or exercise snacking, is something you may have heard me talk about before. In which case this could serve as a reminder, or it might be a new idea to you, but it’s a really important one. The reason I’m reprising this idea is that I put a post up on Facebook yesterday and it got more traction than anything else I’ve posted recently. So I guess it’s resonating. Movement is a fundamental part of my mental wellbeing, it’s absolutely crucial, and that’s pretty much the same for all of us.
As human beings, we were designed to move and the idea of movement snacking is every hour you do a little bit of movement. As you would maybe snack on food through out the day, the idea is very simple you do little movement or exercise snacks.
For me, that might be five pushups, 10 squats, 10 burpees, 10 star jumps. It could be going up and down the stairs a few times. Perhaps having a quick walk around the garden. If you don’t have a garden, a quick whizz around the block, which constitutes the exercise that we’re allowed to do during the national lockdown. You can choose whatever you like, based on your levels of wellbeing. It might start with standing up and down from your chair 10 times.
The idea is that you get little extra bits of movement into your day. You get the heart rate up just a bit, but there’s no sweating, no change of clothes, nothing of that sort, and movement snacking can be done in minutes as opposed to a structure 1 hour exercise session. Perhaps you do your movement snacking whilst you wait for the kettle to boil. You can read more about kettle time training here.
What are the benefits of movement snacking?
The reason this is important is it generates hormones that make us feel good.
Movement is what we were designed to do. It gets fresh oxygenated blood moving through the body, up to the brain and down to the extremities. So it fundamentally, it keeps us warm. It keeps us energised. It keeps us innovated.
Setting movement goals
It’s so easy to do for almost all of us. We can put some sort of movement together every hour.
Now, if you’d like to stretch, target, put something in your diary to do this every single hour. Accept that you may miss a few.
Or if you want to keep it simple, just say, you’re going to do one thing like five squats, maybe once today. Remember if that doesn’t feel like much, it’s a start. The most important thing to remember is if you haven’t been doing any movement snacking up to now, anything you do is a hundred percent improvement on what you were doing yesterday. That’s what I think can be very empowering.
So that’s the idea it’s movement snacking. I encourage you to stay healthy and stay moving. Stay away from people as best you can in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus. But above all else, if you need anything from us, just give me a shout. Other than that all the best for now. And I’ll talk to you very soon.
At Bodyshot Performance, we work with businesses and individuals to manage all aspects of their wellbeing following our Six Signals methodology. Focusing on sleep, mental health, energy, body composition, digestion and fitness. Please get in touch if we can help with any aspects of your wellbeing or your organisation wellbeing.
If you’re interested in finding out what your health IQ is, take the Health IQ test to find out, and get a free 39-page report built around our six signals, which are sleep, mental health, energy, body composition, digestion, and fitness.
