How to Incorporate Exercise Into a Busy Routine

Life is motion and motion is life. If you don’t move it, you with lose it. Inactivity is a huge risk factor for debilitative disease. These tips can help you add stretching and movement to your daily activities.

You may say that you really don’t have time to exercise. If you feel that’s the case for you, here are some simple suggestions from Dr. David Williams, for incorporating activity into your day-to-day routine:

1. Take a 20- or 30-minute stroll after dinner.

2. Take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator.

3. Ride a bicycle to your local store to run errands.

4. Turn household activities, like gardening, into exercise.

5. Play with your children or dog in the yard or a park.

6. Park as far away as possible from the entrance to the grocery store or mall.

7. Every time you have to stop at a stoplight, tighten your abdominal muscles and hold them until the light turns green. Repeat this at every stoplight.

8. While watching TV, talking on the phone, or reading a book, try doing isometric exercises.

9. If you’re by yourself, you can do contortions with your face to help firm up the facial muscle and give yourself a face lift. By moving your lips in and out, your cheeks, eyebrows and making hundreds of movements and faces you can tone up the small facial muscles and avoid some of the wrinkles from those loose and weak muscles.

10. Stretching is great exercise and can be done several times a day with little effort. At least once a day, “reach for the sky”—stand as tall and as straight as you possibly can, push your shoulders back as far as they will go, and put every joint in your body through its total range of motion.

11. After getting in bed at night, stretch your body from your ankles and toes to your head and neck. Imagine making yourself a foot longer and feel the warm relaxing stretch.

Pick a couple of these ideas and use them each day. When you see just how much time we waste sitting, standing in lines, waiting for stoplights, etc., you’ll see just how easy exercise can be and you can do it in a very short time.

Over the years, all aspects of our physical activity have decreased. Rather than making up for it with three 45-minute exercise sessions a week, we need to consciously increase all forms of physical activity, all the time.

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