Time to follow up with a second pillar of health, exercise!
The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week. Alternatively, you can do 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise instead. For even more health benefits, they recommend doubling these recommendations.
Wow! That’s a lot of exercise, huh? I’ve seen some online articles claiming things like “sitting is the new smoking” and such. I take this to mean that sitting is (like smoking used to be) something bad for your health that many people are doing unknowingly.
Prior to the pandemic, I was doing pretty good at getting in exercise. I was meeting a personal trainer at least once a week, taking group fitness classes. This added up to around 3-4 hours of exercise that spanned from moderate to vigorous intensity. I also used to be up and down the stairs at my office 10+ per day, 5 days a week.
Lately, I’ve been trying to get in two 30-minute sessions of strength training and at least 30 minutes of running every week. In theory, I should have more time now that I don’t have a commute to work. However, now I spend more and more of my mornings in meetings, because hey no commute means we can have meetings instead. Ugh.
I’ve been writing these posts about the four pillars of health for a few reasons. One, to inspire all of you to get healthy, to be healthy, to stay healthy. Two, to inspire myself to take all this knowledge in my head and turn it into wisdom by applying it to my own life.
The positive side of things is that I am doing quite well on one pillar (the third one, I’ll share it with you soon, I promise!), so-so on two (exercise and the fourth pillar, also to be shared soon), and that there’s only one (food) where I really need to kick some bad eating habits.
How are y’all doing with your food and exercise? Do you get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise every week? Are you like me, and you spend an immense amount of time sitting?