28th January – Movement Snacks

Move frequently throughout the day.

📚Evidence shows that sedentary behaviour (not moving for long periods of time) increases the likelihood of developing chronic disease such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

What’s more, you can’t outrun sedentary behaviour – Even if you meet the recommended guideline targets for physical activity at other times during the day or week, having long periods of sedentary behaviour still increases your risk of chronic diseases.

The good news is that you don’t have to do lots of exercise to avoid this – just getting up and walking around for 2minutes every 20minutes has been shown to have beneficial effect.

I’m finding that I am spending a lot of time just stuck in my consulting room or at my desk at the moment, doing lists of telephone calls and video meetings. I know so many people out there are the same, glued to their computer screens working from home and endless zoom or teams meetings.

🪑All this sitting is definitely going to be causing us problems – we all need to get moving, even if it is just a little bit. I was writing my post yesterday about healthy food snacks, and it made me think about the idea of having movement snacks for the body throughout the day. My definition of a movement snack is a bit of movement that can occur naturally in your day, or a bit of activity that takes around 2minutes (no more than 5!)

Some things I like to do to get my movement snacks:
👉Use my standing desk so I can move around whilst talking
👉Use a headset whilst talking on the phone so I can walk and talk
👉Walk the long way round to the kitchen at work
👉Do 2minutes yoga-type stretches in my room – I can often be found doing this at the end of a clinic
👉Walk up the stairs at work
👉Decline kind offers of coffee from my colleagues so I can walk up to the kitchen myself (and I combine this with a 2minute mindfulness practice whilst I watch the kettle boil – bonus points for combining the healthy habits!)