Incorporating exercise into your day How Do You Do It?

Incorporating exercise into your day

As many of us head into a second wave, many will be working from home. Discover ways you can exercise better from home or with a remotely delivered exercise program by a Kinesiologist. Starting or maintaining an exercise program can be a challenge. Whether you’re recovering from an injury, have an illness or chronic pain, traditional exercise programs might feel like they’re just not made for you

What are the benefits of exercising?

The good news is that you have options to help yourself get the exercise you need to have a strong and healthy life. Exercise is medicine and evidence suggests that it has preventative effects on heart disease, diabetes, injury recovery and prevention as well as illness and disease management. When it feels like there’s a lot against you, there are also options to help you feel your best and manage your body.

What types of exercises are there?

First, let’s look at the options. We have cardiovascular fitness for our heart and lungs, strength for our muscles and tendon strength as well as flexibility for our joints. Additionally, there are the sports and activities we love to do but we may be held back from doing due to time or physical limitations.

What is Cardiovascular fitness?

Cardiovascular fitness or cardio for short has a variety of options from something as simple as walking for 10-minute intervals, going for a bike ride, going for a run or even doing a higher intensity workout like HIIT or Zumba for a little variety. When asked what is ‘the best’ option, I always like to say two things:

• Start with what you can tolerate and explore what works for you to help you feel good
  
• Focus on what you can do consistently first and then build on from there

If you love to run but your schedule limits you from doing that, or a chronic condition doesn’t allow you to perform at the level that you used to, or a pain/injury holding you back, it is okay to scale back a bit and train for those outcomes. Take some time and make sure you’re doing some form over lower intensity cardio consistently before ramping up to more challenging activities, listen to your body and allow time for rest between.

How can you do cardio at home:

• Walking up and down stairs – being conscious of shortness of breath and fatigue, take breaks and listen to your body
  
• Walking up and down your hallway in your building or home
• Walking around the block or around your neighbourhood
• High intensity interval training – could be as simple as marching on the spot for a time period with rest between intervals or high intensity options like jogging on the spot and skipping rope – space permitting
  

What is Strength?

Strength is a whole other beast. What is the best way to get strength? If I have bulging biceps, a small waist and beefy quads, does that mean I’m strong and healthy? Is that the goal and epitome of health? If your focus is on your health and longevity, I’d say probably not. Those things are great, sure, but strength is a lot easier to obtain with long-lasting results that protect our bodies and health much better if we progress into a strength that challenges our whole body and focus on what we can do instead of how we should look.

Here are some suggestions for incorporating strength into your day:

• Try some squats at your desk until you start to feel a bit tired, there shouldn’t be any pain or discomfort but there can be some fatigue.
• 5-10 minutes of a strength training program with dumbbells or weights.
• Isometrics are a great way to use the rehab exercises from your last injury to continue to check in with your body and keep muscles you forget about strong and awake.
• Resistance bands are an option as well and can be a progression back into heavier weights if we’ve taken some time off from our strength program.

“Listen to your body and see how you feel” is the name of the game. It’s important to identify how much you can do but also what you have done. If you haven’t done a ton of strength training in a while, it’s okay to progress back into it with lighter weight, more rest and a less intense program. We’re aiming for health, body awareness and strength and trying to stay away from injury, overuse and overstress.

How can you do strength exercises at home?

• Step-ups with available stairs
• Incline pushups with stairs, a countertop or even on the floor – there are a variety of variations available based on your level
• Squats or stand ups from a bench
• Isometrics as previously discussed using surfaces like a study table or a wall to add additional resistance (can be intervals of 10-30s holds) and remember to BREATHE

What are Flexibility Exercises?

Lastly, stretching is a common concern amongst patients. How much should I be doing? Is stretching enough? Is it supposed to hurt when I stretch? Stretching is an excellent opportunity to slow down and give your muscles an opportunity to RELAX your muscles and give your body a break from the stresses of the day. It’s also an opportunity to explore how your body can move in different directions than you use throughout the day. The idea is to focus on tolerance and consistency. Avoid pushing to the point of or past pain and aim to get a little bit every day.

I like to give my patients some options when it comes to actually doing stretches:

• Aim for one muscle group a day and try to stretch it twice
• Set aside 5 minutes a day for 3 days a week to start and see if that’s sustainable
• Focus on breathing and what feels good
• Avoid forcing stretches, it does nothing for you

At the end of each week, what can you do consistently and what can you do at all. It’s okay to empower your body to focus on what you can do and work towards the things that may be holding you back.

Let’s put these exercises together

Now that we know the options of exercising and the benefit for our health, we need to fit it into our life. I’ve provided some options above but here are some quick tips to get you focusing on what you love, what you can do and how you can level up your strength and health.

• Start with something that you love to do. Whether its a sport you play once a week, dancing for 10 minutes in your living room or just going for a walk, it all counts towards your activity
• Evaluate what you’re already doing well!! This ones the most important! A lot of the time, I hear that patients feel like adding in exercise into their lives is a chore. So let’s look at what already counts as exercise: household chores, going for a 10 minute walk, 5 minutes of movement or strength related activities at your desk, or if you have a physically demanding job like construction, how long do you do certain activities for and when do you get breaks? This gives us a good idea of what counts towards 150 minutes of activity per week and gives us a chance to fill in the gaps with what our body needs instead of just trying to “exercise”.

How can a Kinesiologist help you with remote exercises? 

Seek out professional help if you want to fast track your plan and know that remote care with a Kinesiologist is a safe and viable option.

A Kinesiologist can give you the feedback you need on how you function now, how to manage your pain, how to integrate exercise based on need and also what you enjoy and also give you some peace of mind so that you don’t have to figure it out all by yourself. Having a support system can give you the opportunity to check in with someone that cares about your success as a whole person and get you moving better and more frequently in addition to taking your pain and conditions seriously.