Challenge Two

Sustain movement.

This challenge doesn’t just last one week, it lasts the whole year and beyond. It fits in with my aims for the year. Walking my dog recently I mused about his needs beyond the basics of food, shelter, and the chance to toilet. He needs human and canine contact, he needs to run (he’s a sighthound, they need to run), he needs a chance to just explore his environment sometimes. All species and types of animals have needs unique to them. This is an important idea to grasp for anyone who looks after animals (or birds etc). It’s an important concept for parents and for those in business and for people in relationships. Animals and people have their own needs, but we also have common needs.

Exercise has been shown to help with depression. I would suggest that movement is both a physical and a psychological need and yet still far too many of us lead sedentary lives. For months now I have seen little in the way of natural light. I have gone to work in the dark and come home in the dark. My weekends have been short on daylight and even shorter on actual sunlight. Here in the UK we’ve been having a wet winter, so that even when I have free time and its light it’s usually been tipping it down with rain. I haven’t wanted to get out and exercise - I’ve wanted to hibernate.

My challenge this week is to build on what I’ve done already to find ways around this. To fit movement into my inside life in a way that is sustainable. Sustaining and sustainable movement.

What I’ve done so far is to fit some short workouts into my routine. When I went onto anti-depressants nearly a year ago I realised that I could not be rubbish about remembering to take my medication. It had to be tacked into my routine rather than creating something novel. So I started taking my tablets with my morning coffee. I have coffee every morning. I do not forget my pills. I have a history of being rubbish with medication, so this is probably the first medication in my life I have consistently taken for any kind of length of time without messing up.

The short workouts have been tacked onto my shower routine. I do my little routine and then step straight until the shower. I don’t forget my shower so I don’t forget to work out. I walk the dog in the morning, so I get some exercise then anyway, but I am thinking about adding some stretches in for whilst I get dressed.

Whilst it’s been so wet and windy I haven’t had much interest in getting outside during my breaks at work, but I do park away from the building so I have more walking to do at the beginning and end of my day. Ideas for during the working day include things like getting up for a walk around the office at intervals, running up and down the stairs a couple of times during a break, having a standing desk, and doing exercises in your chair.

This post, albeit now nearly 10 months old,  on livingthenorishedlife has been some of the inspiration in building up the activity in my life.

I came across this post about standing desks and I wanted to share it;
http://smarterware.org/7102/how-and-why-i-switched-to-a-standing-desk

But then I also want to share what Mark Sisson had to suggest for those of us who sit at a desk all day; 16 tips for deskjockeys.

I have a handout of some desk exercises but they’re a little awkward to copy out, but here someone has done that for me already.

Sometimes it take a little creativity in order to work out how you can fit more movement into your life, but hopefully you still find some inspiration above.

Your challenge for the week is to get moving and make it part of what you do naturally. Our ancestors did not go to the gym, and there is the suggestion that doing set “exercise” can make us less active outside of those times. If we’re trying to learn the lessons of past, I think when it comes to fitness the lesson isn’t just to get strong or be able to run fast, but to be able to sustain movement. I’ve spent plenty of time camping in the woods and I know that largely people who can’t sustain movement can’t cope well with being in such a primal setting. I know, because usually that’s been me and I want that to change.