Step 5: Body Move

You sit, you lie, you get sick
It starts with the chronic pain in the neck or in the back. Headaches and problems with hands and hips come later. These are results of working at a desk, usually 8 hours spent in the same position - it is not good for our back and spine. It leads to the degeneration of the spine. What’s even worse, after working a lot, people don’t go for a walk because they are tired and they go back home to sit in front of the TV, thinking they are relaxing.

This issue with the lack of physical activity refers also to teenagers who massively get a sick note from their doctors for PE classes and instead of a ball, a child holds a smartphone. We have plenty of excuses why we don’t do any sports: “lack of time”, "too big distance to a fitness club“, “lack of money” or maybe just a belief that it is not for us. We may feel motivated when we notice that we put on extra weight or we lose our self-esteem or maybe we just get ill.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Waste of time?
Do you really need to spend long hours in a gym to have an active lifestyle? Active lifestyle also consists of such trivial things as cleaning your floor or making the bed. The source of physical activity are also often things that we perceive as a waste of time, such as going to work on foot, tidying up the house, working in the garden or going shopping on foot. We can also do some sport that is supposed to relax and strengthen our bodies, as well as make them more flexible. Sitting makes our lives shorter. It leads to many illnesses and it makes us feel bad. We are also weaker at dealing with stress.

Activate your body
Many of us may not have motivation to do sports. But it is enough to take just the first step. Just go for 2km walk at the end of the day, inhale some fresh air. Our bodies feel the willingness to be more active very quickly. Being active makes us feel happy and makes us feel better. Our mood is good and we know how to deal with depression and tiredness better and better. It is hormones that make us feel great after jogging or after participating in local yoga classes. When we do some sort of sport, even just for 10 minutes, a day is much better for us than going to the gym for an intense workout once a week. So instead of watching a 30-minute tv show or some stressful news, it is better to go for a walk and think. The therapeutic influence of physical activities on our bodies makes us less stressed. The first symptom of stress is the tension in our bodies. Sometimes we literally feel pain in certain parts of the body. Doing some sort of physical exercise is the best solution in such a situation. Of course, we need to choose the most suitable kind of body movement for us - the exercises that make us feel relaxed. If we want to release the tension, it is good to choose yoga, instead of fitness club. Everyday dose of success will make us proud enough to stick to the sport practice we started. Moreover, we will challenge ourselves with more repetitions, new positions and finally, we will influence our closest relatives to join us!

Sport as therapy
Sport can also be a form of meditation if we do it consciously. Whether doing some exercises on a mat or running, we might have the only chance to be alone and to escape from the rush of life. A lot of women observe that they change the attitude towards their bodies, despite having a few extra kilos or a bit of cellulite. We can see it when we take part in a running event. Women don’t hide their thighs or shoulders under their clothes. Sport and having more and more small victories makes us feel more and more self-confident. Sport also teaches us to respect our bodies that are to serve us our whole life. If we want to have a healthy and happy time vehicle, we need to love it and accept it. Our positive attitude and our commitment to physical exercises will make us slimmer. Our face will shine. The sugar level in our blood will be lower and our brain will get more oxygen. It happens so also because of the fact that when we sweat and move our muscles, we get rid of toxins from our lymphatic system. Although a lot of people don’t like sweating, it is a great way of detoxifying our bodies and opening the pores in our skin.

Sofa or sport?
Being tired after work is our impulse to sit on the sofa. In the past it could be more justified, because we did more physical exercises. We moved more, walked more and we needed to have a passive form of relaxation at the end of the day. Our contemporary world has given us a lot of blessings that make the physical activity less compulsory - escalators, washing machines, dishwashers and of course, cars. Nowadays, a lot of people have jobs which require hardly any physical movement, that is why we need to relax in a more active way. The choice is big:

• Beginners can go for a walk, do Nordic walking, ride a bike or go to a swimming pool regularly
• If we want to relax our body and mind, the best options are yoga, pilates, dance or five Tibetan rites
• For more intense work-out, we can choose going to the gym,  jogging or doing cross fit

If all this seems boring, there is always climbing the wall, bike riding or an ice rink. We can also organize our workplace in a more challenging way. It is important to change the way we sit at least once in an hour. It is also beneficial to stretch a bit every now and then. It may be enough to just stretch our arms and move the neck gently from one side to the other. In some companies there are offices where you can stand while working on your computer. Standing is also a form of physical activity. You can even burn around 200 more calories a day, if you stand instead of sitting. If we take into account the risk of putting on weight if we just sit for so many hours, every 200 calories is like gold dust.

Recommended by Harvard University
Sport can replace a therapy, massage or even a session with a psychologist. And there are so many forms of physical activities available completely for free that it is safe to say - physical activity is a free method for most of illnesses that contemporary people may suffer.

The scientists from Harvard that created the healthy eating pyramid, underline the blessing of being active. They state that implementing some sort of physical activity in your day is an absolute priority if you want to have a healthy lifestyle. It is even more important than our diet! Both make a part of the pyramid, so we should remember we will achieve the best results by combining these two - proper diet and physical activity.

You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.
- Zig Ziglar

Go to Step 6 here >>