5 Tips to Be Physically Active At Home

It’s important for your health that you are physically active even if you work from home So here are some fun, simple work out tips.

For many, the commute to work offers a way to help us stay active.

But now many people are working from home and not commuting to an office.

If this is you, it’s important for both your health and emotional well being that you find new ways to stay physically active.

5 Tips to Be Physically Active At Home

1. Whichever type of physical activity you do, enjoy it

Keep your physical activity routine fresh by choosing enjoyable exercises. If you aren’t too keen on a particular type of exercise, here are some ideas to try something different.

• Explore the multitude of home gym equipment and workout tutorials available online. Each offers unique training sessions for all levels of fitness. I personally love Zumba!
• Create a favorite music playlist to motivate physical activity. Music inspires exercise of all kind – or just fun and silly dance parties. We created a “favorite music playlist” via Amazon Music and constantly update it & play it through our Alexa.
• Get an indoor rebounder. They’re super fun to use. (We have one and love it!)
• Consider ordering various home gym equipment online. We have things like free weights, a work out bench, yoga mat, etc. 

Try to do a hybrid of physical activity: cardio, core strength and flexibility.

• The goal is to create a work out that helps your health in a variety of ways.
• Keep exploring new exercises, so you work out a range of muscle groups.
• You might fall in love with a particular new physical activity, and maintain this new training routine when the lockdown is lifted.

It also helps to set a realistic challenge early on in your physical activity efforts. This will help to motivate you to keep going and not give up. But you should set this goal after you’ve done a few work out sessions, so you can accurately gauge your current fitness level and create a realistic target goal.

2. Manage your health effectively

Your health is determined by more than just physical activity. Even a professional athlete can wind up becoming unhealthy- if they neglect specific aspects of their overall health.

For example, consider Vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin.”

During quarantine lockdown (at the time of writing this article), it is harder to get enough Vitamin D because it is naturally gotten through exposure to sunlight.

Although you might have more time to get some fresh air, many people are remaining inside for safety reasons. And so Vitamin D is a particularly important vitamin for the body right now. It’s been reported to help with immunity – and to regulate teeth, bone and muscle health^[1].

• Vitamin D is found in foods like oily fish (aka sardines), eggs and fortified products like milk.
• Or you can take a liquid Vitamin D3 with blended with K2 as a helpful supplement. 

3. Set realistic goals and targets

Always take it easy to begin with, whatever you decide to try! Once you have a good idea of your fitness level, then get competitive with yourself.

Set a target that you know you would be happy with achieving. But make sure you can achieve it within a month’s time.

A common pitfall with trying to formulate a work out plan:

Many people create work out goals which are far, far away. And then they don’t get to feel the “quick” reward of achieving them. They wind up feeling frustrated and giving up.

So be sure to create goal-setting in the short term, that can be recorded and rewarded right away.

Also, sometimes after the first few exercise sessions, people feel especially tired.

This fatigue is called: Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness (DOMS)

It’s a perfectly normal part of the training process. This is the time period where your body is adjusting to the new demands of physical activity. It commonly happens after an increase in intensity or a new unfamiliar type of exercise.

The solution for DOMS:

• Be sure to do a good warm up before your physical activity.
• Get sufficient rest immediately following a new type of physical activity, or a harder intensity session.

4. Identify ways to stay connected and motivated

While visiting the gym is restricted due to current lockdown regulations, you can still find ways to work out with others.

• Ask friends and family to exercise with via Zoom or your phone. Hold weekly dance parties or group yoga classes.
• Work out with your fitness network through fitness/physical activity mobile apps. These apps can also help you to document and track your progress, in addition to sharing workouts with friends and family. There are many terrific apps, and many often offer their core functionally for free.

It is well documented that exercising with others is highly beneficial.

Advantages of working out with others:

• better performance due to a competitive environment
• enhanced well-being due to socialization
• a greater likelihood of staying committed to your workout goals

5. Make sure you have energy to work out

If you’re feeling low on energy and feel you cannot work out it might be for a few reasons.

• You’re not drinking enough water. Be sure to drink 8 glasses of 8 ounces of water a day.
• You are eating too much sugary or processed foods. Many people are stress eating during this challenging time. I’m a recovered emotional eater, so I’ve been there and binged on that! I offer a range of research-based tools to stop bad eating patterns for good! Learn to stop emotional eating – here!
• You’re not getting enough sleep because you’re anxious. Try drinking calcium magnesium before bedtime. Our family loved this one!
• You’re working from home, and sitting in front of the computer far too much. Try setting an alarm to go off every 30 minutes or an hour. Then stand up from your computer to stretch or walk to the window to look outside.

• Your anxiety is making you feel tired and unproductive. Try journaling to release your stress. I recommend this terrific line-a-day journal.

This unprecedented outbreak has meant that working from home is the new normal. For many people, having this much free time on either side of the working day is unlikely to repeat itself in the near future. Now is a terrific time to try a new exercise regime. 

If you are thinking about increasing your physical activity level and improving your health but don’t know where to start, I hope you try these 5 tips be physically active at home.

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