In This Week’s Thrive In Five We Talk About How to Combat the Mid-afternoon energy Slump with “Movement Snacking”
This week, I’ve been talking to lots and lots of different people at an organisation where I’m the head of wellbeing, and almost every single one of them have reported this mid-afternoon slump in energy.
How do I stay energised after lunch?
And the main thing I’m discovering is that people just aren’t physically moving enough. And I know that’s a bit obvious because we’re working from home in the main, people aren’t necessarily going out and about, there’s a lot of staring at screens. But there are ways that you can move within the confines of a building if you really can’t get out for a five- or ten-minute walk or a quick jog.
Movement snacking
So think of it as movement snacking. In the same way that you might go over to the fridge and pick up a snack from the fridge, you’re going to snack on movement. Lots of different ways you can do this. You could use your staircase, for example, to run up and down five times. You could have a heavy object near your desk, like a kettlebell, a dumbbell, a sack of spuds, books in a rucksack, anything like will do. You can squat with it, you can push it overhead, you can do body-weight exercises like squats and press-ups. You can get out and just stand outside your front door and do 10 jumping jacks or in the communal garden or in your own garden.
Exercise doesn’t have to be one big block
So for two to five minutes of every hour, I want you to be thinking about what you can snack on in terms of movement, because exercise doesn’t have to be one big block. It certainly doesn’t need to be an hour done at some point during the day. It’s most effective when it’s blended with movement, and it’s most effective when you have lots of little spikes of daily life movement throughout the day.
So the take away is movement snacking. What are your movement snacks? What are your go-tos? And have you got your environment set up so all of that is ready? So there’s minimal decisions that you have to make to make it happen.
Have a go and let us no how you get on!
You may also like our podcast on three ways to stay energised – they’re unconventional, free, easy to do and you don’t need any equipment.
