Sedentary….How much is too much?

There are all sorts of electronic devices out there to measure your activity, intensity, heart rate, calories burned, calories consumed, distance ran/biked and maybe even one day will measure and analyze your sweat tell you how much ATP you’ve depleted in your work out, who knows? There’s even this…device you put in your athletic clothing and it measure all sorts of stuff that would make my craft useless.

Keeping active is so important this day in age, with so many modern conveniences taking on our general workloads, maybe what we should be using these devices for is to measure how often we are actually sedentary. We all have a general idea of when we’ve been working our asses off physically, we feel it in how soaked with sweat we are or how tight a muscle has become. Yet we often confuse our mental drain from nonphysical work as a reason to become sedentary.

We have to become more aware of how inactive we are to push ourselves to be more physically active on a daily basis. How much time do you spend at the computer? How much of your day is spent sitting in a car or on a bus? How many hours in your life have you stood in line or sat on the toilet. How much time do you spend sitting and reading or watching a new prolific television series from start to finish ‘cause it’s that damn good? (my guilty pleasures are shows about prison life. And there are LOTS of them!!)

We enjoy most of the sedentary things we do, and that’s okay, we just need to be aware of how much time we spend doing them. Let’s face it we have to work and sometimes that means sitting in an hour of traffic each way just to spend the middle of your day sitting at a desk or sitting through meetings, sitting down for lunch and sitting some more at your desk and then back in traffic and then sitting down for dinner and then BAM!! You’re pooped from sitting all day so you sit a little more before you go to bed to wake up and do that 5 or more days in a row. Some of you squeeze in a work out at the gym or a run before dinner, but is it enough? I can tell you between your work day, sleep necessities and general relax time; it most likely is not enough.

So how do we squeeze in more activity with so much stuff making forcing us to become sedentary?

Be reasonable with yourself. Modern conveniences were meant to make your life less labor intensive, and even more so they cater to make you more comfortable in general. I’m not saying to throw out your washing machine to squeeze in an arm work out, or sell your car and only walk or run EVERYWHERE! But, if you can find a way to squeeze more activity into your daily life without having to set aside a work out block of time you will be more successful and keeping the sedentary lifestyle at bay. And your work outs will be easier and more fun.

Here are some tips to squeezing in the movements your body is so delicately begging for.

Don’t look for the closest parking spot!! It’s not gonna kill you to walk a block. How much time did you spend circling the block like a shark waiting for the best spot, when you could have just parked your car anywhere and walked your ass to your destination a lot faster? How many times have you used your car to go pick something up at a place you could have walked to easily?

Weigh out your options with spending more money to make your life easier and your body more comfortable. For instance most people laugh at my Homer Simpson type lawn mower that is run on human energy instead of a gas powered motor. I could probably by a new fancy lawn mower but why spend the money? In fact, I think we may have one in the garage somewhere but I’m not gonna pull out that sucker to let it cheat my body of some well-deserved activity. Yeah I sweat when I mow my lawn, most people do and they don’t have to use half the effort I do to get those blunt ass blades to trim my grass to the proper length.

Decide what modern convenience you can live without or just use less, to give your body what it really wants…movement.