How to Move More If You Have Stopped Being Active

I recently had lunch with a friend of mine who is in his fifties and in the best shape of his life. He just came back from a high school reunion and was telling me how shocked he was at the number of health conditions his ex-classmates had.

I had always been impressed by his dedication to healthy living and I also assumed(wrongly) that he was a fitness freak. So I never dared to ask him about his routine. However, this draft has been sitting in the works for a long time as I build and adapt my own routine in my late thirties, so I asked the question:

“What is your secret?”.

What he said partly surprised me; he said that he does not have a specific training schedule like I thought. He just advised me to intentionally move more. And I think that is what a lot of us, including myself, get wrong,

With the advent of the fitness industry, we have glamorised this whole concept of getting in shape. When in fact, we just need to move more.

So let’s dive into a few foundations of what moving more means.

The right mindset

What are your beliefs about working out right now? You will probably not need this article if you have a disciplined working out schedule amid a busy life.

I am so busy and sometimes overwhelmed, especially when I was in a corporate setting that I sometimes just gave up or postponed my workout. I thought it meant an hour at the gym or an intense class that is going to make me sweat my whole face off.

But having that mindset means that on days when we have too much to do (which is most days, let’s be honest), we will put exercise on the backburner instead of trying to be less ambitious and moving for 15 minutes.

The other belief that I had and sort of absorb from people around me was that it is inevitable for your health to go as you turn older. But ageing does not mean bad health. Ageing just means going through changes that are associated with growing older.

Like some of you, I have gained a few pounds during the pandemic. Months at a remote desk just made me lethargic. Then post-pandemic, I started showing signs of ageing; grey hairs and I tire more easily. I never got back to my pre-pandemic routine until a few days ago.

But now with my recent dance classes and maintaining a constant number of steps per day, I have started to feel lighter. Even as a life coach, there were certain biases that I had yet to overcome, health and ageing were one of them.

So, in essence, we just need to reframe our definition of what moving means, at any age. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, moving is just taking one more step than what you used to.

Battling the status quo

Flail your right arm. Come on, do it. Now flail your left arm. Congrats, you just moved!

I am the first one to acknowledge how difficult it is easy to get back into fitness once you have started to let go. Especially, when you have a desk job and you are too exhausted at the end of the day.

And the best way, to come out of a rut, is to start small. If you want, you can continue flailing your arms if you don’t mind looking like a lunatic. Otherwise, any type of motion that moves you to a different point is good.

From my experience, people who set intentions to exercise and then fail have one thing in common: they set the bar too high with zero awareness of where they stand.

They sign up for a HIIT class that promises to burn 600 calories in 45 mins when they have not even taken a long walk for the past year. That is just an exaggerated example but the point is to start by aiming low and doing a little each day to make your body re-adapt to exercise.

Just do it

Human adaptability is a double-edged sword. On one side, we attune ourselves to new situations using our evolutionary mechanism. On the other side, it also makes us adaptable to bad habits.

Think of it this way, whether it is a good habit or a bad habit they all had a starting point. Then the point becomes a habit with regular usage. So we can adapt to good or bad. Usually, the bad is more comfortable and hence easy. But it is highly possible to get out of it, however deep it has set in.

And using Nike’s slogan, the only way is to do it, but slowly.

Park your car a bit further down and walk half a mile. Take one extra set of stairs a day. Cancel your uber eats app and walk to the restaurant. Wake up, stretch and walk ten times back and forth to the kitchen before making your coffee. The ideas are endless because the opportunities to move are everywhere.

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We think we have to fit exercise in a time and place on our calendar when in reality movement can be done anywhere. You can also pace during a meeting (just warn people first).

Instead of thinking that you should plan to work out more, just tell yourself that: I am integrating more movement into my daily routine. Verbs matter, Should is an imposition in the future whereas I am is in the present.

We have overthought fitness and turned it into an unreachable concept. With the advent of social media and an overhyped fitness industry involving protein shakes, bulging biceps and confusing body parts with fruits, we forgot the true meaning of movement.

Just remember, any physical action, be it with your hand feet, or head is a single movement. Many movements become a dance. However small or big your steps are, just do it.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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