Some of us don’t even walk five minutes in a month. But there’s no excuse not to exercise the easy way...
It seems that many of us are intimidated by the idea of joining a gym or slogging round the park for an hour. Many of us also complain that we don’t have the time to fit an exercise regime into our busy daily schedules.
Happily, there are ways to add exercise to your day that don’t really feel like, well, exercise. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Less is more
The first change to make is a psychological one. Many of us think that if we’re not working ourselves to exhaustion we’re not really exercising. In fact, scientists have discovered that not only is doing something better than doing nothing, quite often doing a bit is better than doing a lot.
For example, researchers from the University of Copenhagen formed three groups of volunteers, all made up of young men who took little exercise. The first group they told to stick to their normal - quite sedentary - routines. The second were given a moderate exercise regime to follow, and the third a more intense regime.
The first group didn’t lose any weight, as you might expect. But what surprised the scientists was that the second group - the moderate exercisers - lost significantly more weight over a three month period than their harder working colleagues.
“Participants exercising 30 minutes per day burned more calories than they should relative to the training programme we set for them,” said researcher Mads Rosenkilde.
“In fact we can see that exercising for a whole hour instead of a half does not provide any additional loss in either body weight or fat.”
So the good news is this. If you can’t fit an hour of exercise into your daily routine, half an hour is fine. If you don’t like the idea of working out, a walk is good enough. Here’s how to fit brief but effective exercise into your day, every day.
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