Many of us do not take working out or even simple exercising seriously. We often just completely disregard it, procrastinate or are too busy to stretch our limbs and flex our muscles. Yes, we heard the news: we will eventually develop horrible diseases if we fail to include exercise in our daily routine, but we still would not budge. Should we still wait for the worst to happen before we start exercising? Here are some simple things we can do along with our everyday activities to help make exercise a part of our daily routine without going to the gym:
1. Stretching. When we wake up, it is almost always automatic for us to stretch our limbs as we open our mouths wide in a big yawn. But while we are at it, we can start stretching every major muscle groups that we are going to use the whole day. Stretching is one way of warming up your muscles before you use them to avoid straining.
a. Start stretching the neck muscles by rotating the head to one direction after another several times.
b. Rotate both shoulder joints and stretch your arm muscles. You can also close and open your hands at the same time to warm up the hand muscles.
c. You can simultaneously stretch your lower limbs as well as your body to stretch the muscles of the abdomen.
d. Rotate your ankles one after another and do an alternate plantar and dorsal flexion of your feet to stretch the leg muscles.
2. Upper body workout.When we carry things, we use our upper body and upper limb muscles' strength to lift it up and carry it. However, we usually just let our arms relax and just let the hands bear all the weight of whatever we are carrying. What we can do is actually flex our arms a little bit. This will help lighten the load for our hands and keep our muscles toned. It also utilizes the strength of the chest and abdomen muscles, depending on the weight of our carry-on.
3. Lower body workout.Unless you are unable to walk in some way, you should be able to exercise your lower extremities all the time. Walking is the simplest yet best exercise we can do. When going somewhere that is not so far, we can leave the car in the garage and use our two legs to get us there. Besides keeping the tone of the calf and thigh muscles, this activity also doubles as a cardiac workout, especially if we step up a notch and jog instead.
Although these steps are simple, they actually work when done in accordance to our daily activities. Exercising does not need to be done only in the morning or in the afternoon. It would be best for us to incorporate exercise into whatever we do. This way we do not have to worry and/or feel guilty about not being able to exercise. During the weekend or whenever you get your extra free time, hit the gym for a complete workout. Do not be surprised if you do not feel as sore as you should be had you not done these simple exercises for the past few weeks.
