Move more: 11 creative and practical tips!

Geschatte leestijd: 8 minuten That many people should move more is not world news. Here not the standard cliché tips to move more. Here especially more background knowledge and tips regarding the right mindset to move more.

‘Just move more’

Actually, you don’t have to explain to anyone why physical activity is healthy and necessary. The challenge always lies in the personal application of that knowledge in practice. So, here we will not simply follow well-known tips like: ‘cycle to work more often’, or ‘take the stairs instead of the elevator’, etc. If you hadn’t heard such tips before, you would have thought of them yourself. More importantly: such tips are simply not practical for many people. Cycling for two hours to arrive sweaty at work is not always an appealing thought. Taking the stairs isn’t very helpful either if there are no elevators at your workplace and you live in a bungalow. It’s a bit like giving herring to someone who doesn’t like herring. Therefore, in this article, I will mainly provide tips and facts focused on the right mindset when it comes to motivation for more movement. Learning to fish so that you can decide which fish you catch yourself. From those tips and facts, it should become clear that a personalized approach is best in all respects. A standard list of tips does not fit such a personalized approach.

Tip 1: Decouple ‘moving more’ from ‘losing weight’!

It’s often not the question of how or how much you should move that is really important. The real question is how you get yourself moving and keep moving. Creating the right expectations can be crucial. If losing weight is your goal, then the result of exercising more may disappoint. Disappointment can be a precursor to giving up. Moving more has many more benefits than possibly losing body fat. Perhaps you should set aside those blinders along with the scale for a while. We have often described here that moving more often yields disappointing results when weight loss is the goal. Physical activity often results in a smaller energy deficit than we expect. Research shows that if, for example, you were to burn 500 kcal every day by cycling, the eventual energy deficit may be much smaller. This is mainly due to compensatory behavior such as eating more because you’ve exercised, or moving less at other times. Your body may also slow down metabolism in an energy-saving response to the extra expenditure. So, expect more from a diet to lose weight. Moving more, on the other hand, turns out to be more successful in not regaining lost weight. Moving more offers many health benefits, even if it does not lead to weight loss. Your fat mass itself, for example, can become less unhealthy by changing the properties of the fat cells themselves. Physical activity appears to be able to bring about such positive changes. Training also increases muscle mass function. This allows them, among other things, to become better at absorbing glucose from your bloodstream. In addition, you improve the function of the heart and blood vessels with a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases as a result.

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Tip 2: Every little bit helps!

In the next tip, I will address recommendations for the weekly amount of exercise that is advised. However, I first want to emphasize that it is not always convenient to have a fixed idea of what is sufficient exercise and what that exercise should look like. When it comes to the amount of exercise, above all, every little bit helps. It is a commonly heard and given advice that you should always set goals, but that medal has a flip side. For example, you can tell yourself that you should walk for an hour three times a week from now on. Then it quickly feels like failure if you could only go for a walk once in a certain week. There’s a chance that you might even skip that one opportunity under the pretext that the week is already ‘failed’. Many, if not all, of the benefits of physical activity are proportional to the amount of exercise. Moving less means less effect, not ‘no effect’. So, avoid thinking that exercise is only useful if you stick to pre-planned amounts. Perhaps even more importantly: thinking that you’re not moving enough can be a stress factor responsible for many negative health effects. In 2007, an interesting study was conducted [1]. Chambermaids working in a hotel had sufficient physical activity through their work (half an hour a day in the study). However, because the women themselves did not see the work as physical activity, most of them thought they were not moving enough. Then half of them were told that they were moving enough. A month later, in this group, blood pressure, weight, and body fat percentage had decreased. The expression “do it right, or don’t do it at all” doesn’t apply here. Be proud of what you do instead of stressing about what you don’t do.

Tip 3: Moving is a choice

Speaking of stress: an important factor that determines how much and how intensively you move is your perception of how much choice you have. If you feel that you are forced to do something, chances are you will enjoy it less. That’s no different with physical activity. One of the most common barriers to being more active is a lack of time. This is a barrier that is more related to perception than reality. The days on which people had to work 12 hours in the fields are over. So, a lack of time to be physically active is not primarily due to the time spent on other activities, but rather to the way you deal with your time. Perhaps it would be good for some to do less and for others to do more. The way we deal with time is strongly related to how much control we think we have over our time. In a classic experiment, people who believed they had a lot of control over their time found the time to move more often than people who didn’t. That’s a nice thought, but you don’t need a time machine to have control over your time. You can start by thinking about what you actually want to do. What do you like to do? Not just now, but also in the long term. That can be different for everyone. Some people enjoy doing nothing, others have to exercise a lot to satisfy their needs. Do you like cycling, dancing, playing football, or walking? Then chances are that you will do it more often. What you want and what you like to do has more influence on your behavior than what you think you should do. Physical activity that you enjoy is also more sustainable. You can maintain it for longer. Research shows that when people do not enjoy sports, they stop doing it after an average of six months. If they do enjoy it, they continue for at least four years. So, it is worth taking the time to find an activity that you enjoy.

A solid movement advice

Finally, I can’t ignore the general advice on physical activity entirely. Especially when it comes to people who don’t have any movement habit at all, this is indispensable. The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend that healthy adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity a week, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity activity. They also recommend muscle-strengthening activities on 2 or more days a week that work all major muscle groups. This can be seen as a guideline, not as a hard rule. It is more important to sit less and move more than to do a certain amount of exercise per week. Keep in mind that this guideline comes from the United States and that these recommendations are sometimes different in other countries. Moreover, this guideline does not take into account the additional effect that reducing sitting time can have. This is why some people are now recommending that you sit less and move more instead of simply exercising more. Finally, an important point: these recommendations are based on what we know now. We are still learning more about the health effects of physical activity and how best to quantify and qualify them. If there is one thing that you should have learned from this article, it is that such general guidelines do not work for everyone. What can we do with these recommendations? Consider it as a starting point, not as a hard and fast rule. If you are doing little or no exercise Don’t wait for your head to be ready to move. Get moving and your head will follow automatically.

Tip 10: Spend a little more time on your Spotify playlists

Music gets you moving. That’s just an innate quality. It’s a pity that we often suppress that tendency to move automatically to music at a later age. When I look at Theresa May, I understand that to some extent, but moving doesn’t necessarily have to be dancing (or something pretending to be). Music works in two ways when it comes to getting people moving and keeping them moving, through motivation and dissociation, respectively.

Whenever I hear the song “Eye Of The Tiger” by Survivor, I always feel like putting on a faded grey tracksuit, walking into a butcher’s shop to use slaughtered pigs as punching bags, and going for a run until I reach a big staircase which I then sprint up to cheer at the top.

Motivation and Dissociation

The above is the personal example I gave of the motivating effect of music. However, the article mainly focused on research examining the effect of music on athletic performance. It turned out that endurance athletes in particular can benefit from music. These improved performances are not only caused by the fact that the music pumps you up. Music is also able to mentally disconnect you from your physical action. Dissociation, in this context, means that, for example, you’ve been walking with music for a while and suddenly can’t consciously remember the last few hundred meters you’ve walked. The music puts you in a certain zone and partially disconnects thoughts from physical action. Running ten kilometers can feel like five kilometers that way.

Tip 11: If you choose a training buddy, choose carefully

People are often advised to exercise and train together with others. ‘Fun’, ‘social’, ‘support’ are terms that often accompany such advice. Personally, I’m someone who prefers tip 10 over tip 11. I’d rather have headphones on my head than a running buddy who repeats the same jokes and complaints about colleagues every week. But everyone is different. A training buddy can work positively and negatively, both in terms of how often you move and how you move. Example: You agree to go for a walk together three evenings a week. The positive aspect of such an arrangement is that maybe you didn’t feel like going on the third evening, but you still feel obliged to go. The risk of such an arrangement is that your training buddy doesn’t feel like it that evening and just stays home. Are you then someone who goes for a run alone, or do you stay at home too? So choose your training buddy wisely. If you still have to break up with your training buddy, we also have some tips for that.

References

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