Older Bolder Life

Stronger | Leaner | Sharper | Longer - From Older Bolder Fitness

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Picking the Low Hanging Fruit: Move, Move, Move

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As the first post in our picking the low hanging fruit to get started series, let’s actually tackle one right off the bat that isn’t food and nutrition related – the simple principle of choosing to move more during the day.

For those starting from a more or less sedentary lifestyle, there are a host of simple actions to take to integrate more movement into your lifestyle. (Even if you’re well along the way to optimizing your fitness and functional capacity, there’s likely even useful movement you could be doing.) Let’s talk about three easy examples that anyone could start with today.

Unchain Yourself from Your Desk (or Couch)

Without belaboring the devastating consequences of sitting all day, whether collecting dust on the couch, or chained to a desk at work, let’s agree to stipulate to the fact that prolonged, for the most part uninterrupted sitting opens the door to a host of issues, and has the potential to negatively impact just about every system in the human body. (Another topic perhaps for another day, and trivially easy to research in detail yourself).

I advise friends, family, and clients to get up at least every thirty minutes (some would argue twenty might even be better) and move around for two to three minutes, even if just a walk down the hall or around the house. Years ago I had a medical practice partner who would run to his office and do pushups or an uber-quick kettle ball routine for two minutes, then jump right back into his day.

Every two hours, take a longer break for 5-15 minutes; this is a perfect time for a quick walk outside if access, weather, and your schedule allows.

Park and Walk

We all have errands to run; some of us with busy families and friends seemingly have a never-ending list of errands to run just about every day.

One of the simplest ways to add more movement to your routine is quit playing the ‘search for the closest parking spot’ game and instead choose to park on the outermost reaches of the parking lot and walk.

Recently a data-nerd client sent me a tally of walking time she’d added to her week parking in the North Forty parking lots as she calls them – it added up to nearly two and half hours during a busy shopping week.

Add in Two Short Walks a Day

I’m a huge fan of walking. Walking offers an extraordinary array of benefits physiologically and even psychologically, is accessible to just about every one on the planet, is an extremely economical way to add useful exercise to your routine, and can be done anywhere.

As most of the country moves into the spring season, I’ve been challenging clients to try a quick walk in the morning to start the day (personally I’m not sure what I’d do without my 45-90 minute early morning walks), and another quick walk after dinner in the evening. These don’t need to be a trek worthy of Lawrence of Arabia; if just starting out 10-15 minutes at a time will get you on the road to recovery. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your conditioning, and enjoyment of the process, develops.

More on picking the low hanging fruit on your health journey to come.

Foundation Series: Fitness Secret Weapon No. 1 – MOVE

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I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with a good friend from Montana.

He’s a very successful businessman with a loving family; though his principle business interest is commercial (multifamily) real estate, he and his two sons run an impressive grass-fed cattle operation in Montana on three fairly large land plots (they call them ranches up in that part of the world).

We’ve known one another for a lustrum or better now, and he’s been impressed enough with my body composition (and other) changes over the past eighteen months to himself jump on the Primal bandwagon. Working on his seventh decade of a very active life, he’s still out in the field six of seven days per week, though spends the bulk of his time behind a desk. He and his clan have additionally weathered a heart-wrenching tragedy this spring with the loss of a daughter-in-law.

After a rapid and for the most effortless weight loss for the first four months as a Primal guy, he’s been stalled now for the last two months and change. Even more frustrating to him was the fact that he felt his overall fitness level hadn’t changed radically since the New Year. So he called me Saturday afternoon, feeling just a bit defeated, and looking for some answers.

Time for a Bit of Long-Distance Detective Work

The first half hour of our conversation was spent with me mostly listening, prompting with a question here and there, but gradually a consistent story began to take shape, focused around two things.

One, and of lesser importance in the big picture, my friend had been consuming (too much) fruit (mostly South American in origin) on a near daily basis during the long Montana winter, which, pending where you happened to live in the state, persisted via a snowy, cold spring until late April or early May this year. This is another story for another day, but suffice it to say that fructose has been the undoing of many a concerted weight loss attempt.

Two, and perhaps most critically, my compadre hasn’t been moving enough. Yes, he’s busy, some days putting in 15 hours between desk, truck, and tractor, but we pretty quickly came to the same conclusion – he’s been far too sedentary coming out of winter and having dealt with the issues they faced as an extended-family unit this spring.

Back to the Basics with the Secret Weapon of Movement

One of the first things we did together was agree that movement – general, everyday, functional-task linked movement is a critical cornerstone for good health (and the Primal lifestyle). I reminded him that the movement we’re talking about here, the essential, get-off-your-butt and just move stuff, isn’t really what most would call targeted exercise or higher-level training (Sisson speaks to the distinction ably here), but really ought to be something we all think of as an essential, pretty much non-negotiable part of our day.

While for many a goal of 10,000 steps a day is ambitious, my friend noted that much of the tasking that he does “around the place” could be easily accomplished on foot instead of from the seat of a four-wheeler, truck, or tractor. Given the trials of the spring, and a generous spring runoff, he’d not be fly fishing much, though had two excursions involving hiking set up for this week (dang, that sounds like fun).

We chatted about ways to incorporate quick walks into his day, like a quick walk breathing in those glorious summer Montana mornings before settling in for the day’s work, a 10-minute stretch every two hours (or less) during the desk day, a 20-30 minute walk after dinner, and rewarding himself with at least one 2 hour or better hike each week to fish his favorite waters on the Big Hole River near his home.

We agreed that for him, a rational, baseline goal for moving in some form of low level aerobic activity (it works for most of us, too) would be in the 5-7 hours per week range, shooting for at least an hour per day or better (in a addition to his HIIT and resistance workouts he’s been fairly diligent with so far).

Bottom line, moving more is something we all can fairly easily incorporate into our day; it may take a bit of effort and reprograming and old habit or two, but the results build in quickly.