Seven tips to avoid a sedentary lifestyle at home

 

Many amongst us have changed our patterns of work and study, spending more time at homes. This gives us less opportunity to move around, whereas if we had a daily routine or commute to work or school, we would spend at least 3000 to 4000 steps walking throughout the day. Combined with some daily exercise and our visits to the gym, we might have led a more active lifestyle.

But now our routines have changed and we might not be as active as before. We are probably sitting too much and spending more time being sedentary. Not only does this lead to weight gain in the long run, it causes back and hip pain as well as increases our risks for diabetes. Also, after so much of sedentary time, it might be difficult to get back to the usual exercise routine and even simple things like climbing stairs might start to tire us out. So let's change a few things every day to counter these effects.

Some tips for countering the effects of sitting too much

1) Walk around 5 to 10 minutes every hour

Make a conscious effort to move around and walk every hour for 5 to 10 minutes. Try to get 1000 steps per hour, if you wear a fitness tracker. If you start at 10am and walk 1000 steps every hour,  you would have walked 10000 steps throughout the day!

2) Wear a fitness tracker

Wear a fitness tracker and ensure that you are getting at least 7500 to 10000 steps per day. You don't have to buy an expensive fitness tracker- even your phone can be used to track your steps and it's a bonus if you're on a conference call, you can just walk around the house and add to your step count for the day.

3) Drink 8 to 10 glasses of water

Make it a point to remain hydrated. You can keep a bottle of water near you or in the kitchen so that you are forced to get up and walk. This will also force you to walk to the restroom and break up the monotony of sitting. Drinking more water will also help you to reduce the water weight.

4) Do some exercise

Take out time in your lunch break to do some exercise for at least 30 minutes.Choose to work out in the morning or evening. You can follow a few workouts that you like on Youtube and play it on your computer or iPad and follow along.

5) Use your couch for tricep dips

If you like to spend your leisure time watching the latest Netflix show, use your couch for tricep dips or do some push-ups during the commercial breaks. 

Need to lose some weight? Try out the 3-day Toast diet or the Weetabix diet.

If you feel energetic, you can do a set of 10 jumping jacks. Try to work up to 10 sets of that during the day and you would have completed 100 jumping jacks throughout the day.

6) Clean your home

Cleaning the house can also be an energetic activity. You can burn up to 250 calories mopping the floor for an hour. Now that's an inspiration to clean your room!

7) Stretch!

After spending a whole day sitting down, have you tried a stretch? How good that feels!

 Try to stretch more frequently, standing up and raising your hands above your head, clasping them and taking a deep breath.

Take frequent stretch breaks to get your blood circulation moving. 

When you sit all the time, your hip flexors (muscles across the front of hips) become very tight and can lead to hip as well as back pain. To counter this, do a few yoga poses like low lunge, warrior pose 1, warrior pose 2 and triangle pose. This can be done as a circuit, repeating for both legs and holding each pose for 30 seconds. Doing 2 sets of this will only take 5 minutes and will refresh your body.

 

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