Move more: 11 creative and practical tips!

Geschatte leestijd: 11 minuten That many people should move more is not breaking news. Here are 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’

You don’t really need 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, well-known tips like ‘take the bike to work more often’ or ‘take the stairs instead of the elevator’ will not simply follow. If you haven’t heard such tips before, you would have thought of them yourself. More importantly, such tips are simply not practical for many people. Two hours of cycling to arrive sweaty at work is not always an appealing thought. You also don’t get much out of the tip to take the stairs if there are no elevators at your workplace and you live in a bungalow. A bit like giving herring to someone who doesn’t like herring. In this article, I will therefore mainly provide tips and facts focused on the right mindset when it comes to motivating yourself to move more. Learning to fish so you can decide which fish to catch yourself. From those tips and facts, it should be 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 need to move that’s really important. The real question is how you get yourself moving and keep moving. Creating the right expectations can be crucial.If weight loss is your goal, the result of extra movement can be disappointing. Disappointment can be a harbinger of giving up. Moving more has many more benefits than possible loss of body fat. Maybe you should temporarily put aside those blinders along with the scale. We’ve described here before that more movement 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, one were to burn 500 kcal every day by cycling, the ultimate energy deficit could 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 can also slow down metabolism in an energy-conserving response to the extra expenditure. So expect more from a diet to lose weight. Moving more, however, proves to be more successful in not regaining lost weight. Moving more offers many health benefits, even if it doesn’t lead to weight loss. Your fat mass itself, for example, can become less unhealthy by changing the characteristics of the fat cells themselves. Physical activity appears to be able to cause such positive changes.Training also increases the function of muscle mass. This can make them better at absorbing glucose from your bloodstream, among other things. 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 bit helps!

In the next tip, I will discuss recommendations for the weekly amount of exercise recommended. However, I first want to emphasize that it is not always handy to have a fixed idea of what is enough exercise and what that exercise should look like. As for the amount of movement, above all, every little bit helps. It’s a commonly heard and given advice that you should always set goals, but that medal has a flip side. For example, you could tell yourself that from now on you should walk for an hour three times a week. Then it quickly feels like failure if you could only go for a walk once in a certain week. There’s a chance you’ll also let that one opportunity pass unused 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 movement. Less movement means less effect, not ‘no effect’. So avoid thinking that movement is only useful if you stick to pre-planned amounts. Perhaps even more important: thinking that you move too little 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 due to their physical work (half an hour a day in the study). However, because the women did not see the work itself as physical activity, most of them thought they were not moving enough. Then half of them were told that they do move enough. A month later, in this group, blood pressure, weight, and body fat percentage had decreased. So the expression “do it well, 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 very broad concept. Interpret it broadly too

That brings me to the next handy tip. You should see physical activity as a very broad concept. The World Health Organization recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week. The chambermaids from the study apparently had a certain idea of ‘physical activity’. They automatically thought of specific forms of recreational exercise, voluntary and in their own time. In a study from 2017, these 150 minutes were achieved with half an hour of household chores, 5 days a week [2]. This was enough to reduce the risk of death by 28% and the risk of cardiovascular disease by 20%. People who moved much more (750 minutes per week) further reduced these risks. It was striking that only 3% of the people filled in so much exercise recreationally. In all other cases, this was achieved through work, commuting to work, and household chores.

Tip 4: Move more? Keep it fun!

If you want to be super muscular and mega lean, you’ll have to rely on discipline, perseverance, and goals. However, if you just want to have a ‘normal’ healthy body, it’s wise to focus on what you enjoy. If you dread going into the gym so much, then just walk past it. You can do that with a detour of half an hour, but you might get more enjoyment out of your daily movement. Unless, of course, you find nothing more enjoyable than yelling “Bye Basic-Fit!” as you walk by and especially enjoy the fact that you don’t have to go inside. I recently surprised someone again when I said that I don’t enjoy working out in the gym. I find pleasure in the result and the fact that I’ve given myself some ‘me-time’. For the result I want, lifting serious weights is mandatory. If it were only about healthy movement, I would have gone back to playing basketball and returned to the dojo. I don’t need motivation for that; I do it for my pleasure. Maybe it’s not for you to chase after a ball or dodge sword blows. Some people may indeed have an allergy to exercise, but that’s physical, not mental. I can’t imagine there’s absolutely no physical activity that you enjoy (besides sex). Dancing, paintball, old Dutch bowling, playing more with your children, or swaying with the hula hoop. Seize every fun excuse to move more until you only associate movement with pleasure.

Tip: 5 minutes of walking is 5 minutes not sitting

So far, we’ve talked about the benefits of movement, but not so much about the downsides of what you usually do when you’re not moving: sitting. Maybe it can motivate you to get moving if you immediately consider it as a break from what is now called ‘the new smoking’. Recently, we described, among other things, that prolonged sitting is bad for the brain [3]. We also described the effect of sitting on weight and blood pressure. We can also come back to tip 3 here. Sitting doesn’t automatically mean sitting still. Just moving your feet every few minutes (a form of ‘dynamic sitting’) can increase blood flow to the legs instead of decreasing it [4]. Just a simple movement like circling your feet a few times or bouncing them up and down on your toes can achieve positive health effects (and/or limit negative effects).

Tip 6: ‘Standing is the sister of movement’

I must admit that I tried dynamic sitting a few times and it didn’t really work for me. You have to keep reminding yourself to move while you’re focused on your work.However, just because I work on a laptop doesn’t mean I have to sit. Since I have the opportunity to work at a standing desk, I use it frequently. Fun fact: besides avoiding the disadvantages of sitting, you burn 30% more calories by working standing up instead of sitting [5].

Tip 7: Look for the big fish

Physically, exercise is not something humans should actively strive for from an evolutionary perspective. Our bodies are developed with the assumption that a certain amount of movement is necessary for survival. Chasing a mammoth, running away from a saber-toothed tiger. Nowadays, especially in Western societies, relatively few people get enough exercise from their work. For British postal workers in a 2017 study, they did 15,000 steps a day to deliver the mail [6]. That’s 5,000 steps more than recommended for health, and those extra steps turned out to be even more beneficial. The opposite was true for administrative workers at the same postal company. They sat almost all day, so they didn’t have the benefits of movement and had the disadvantages of sitting. This translated into significant differences in the risk of cardiovascular disease. The sedentary employees had a larger waist circumference, higher BMI, and worse blood sugar and cholesterol. For each hour the employees spent sitting per day, the risk of cardiovascular disease increased by 20%.

“If only I were a postal worker”

In 1953, similar differences in the risk of heart disease were observed between British tram drivers and conductors on the same tram. Walking through the tram aisle by the conductor caused the significant difference in movement [7]. We can’t all become postal workers or conductors at the NS. But such studies show two important points. The first of these we already mentioned in tip 3: All movement is movement. So the postal worker shouldn’t feel like he/she ‘has to go for a run for half an hour in the evening. The thought alone could cause stress, as seen in the chambermaids. The second point is that the real big fish in terms of movement are often found in your normal daily activities rather than recreational activities.

Tip 8: Adjust your schedule to your biological clock

This might be a good time to give those cliché tips that I said I wanted to avoid in the introduction. Cycling to work instead of driving, taking the stairs more often. If you can apply this, then these are great ways to make structural positive changes. Unfortunately, such tips are not applicable to everyone. Many are simply limited in their choices for filling a workday. However, what applies to many people is that there is one defining moment of the day. One moment that determines whether you spend the whole evening sitting like in the office or whether you get moving. For one person, this is right upon arriving home, for another it’s after dinner. That moment when you sink sighing into the couch and check if there’s something new on Netflix. When you put yourself in the resting position, mentally and physically (nervous system in ‘battery saver mode’), you make it very difficult for yourself to get back into action.(Re)recognize these moments for yourself and adjust your movement schedule accordingly. That fitness class at 8:00 PM may sound very appealing, but may not be realistic if you first need to shake your butt awake. You won’t get me into action so quickly at that time (or at other times when it comes to twerking). After a day at the office, I have to go straight to the gym, or else it won’t happen. Adjust your schedule to your biological clock to increase the chances of persistence.

Tip 9: The wrong mindset leads to too little movement, but also the other way around

These could be moments when you’re least motivated to move more when extra movement can offer even more benefits. You don’t have to think of airy-fairy things when we talk about the mind-body connection. A simple example is the vicious circle that can arise when you’re in a mental dip or even a depression yourself. A study with people with depression found that more than half reported that their mood made it harder to get moving [8].

Breaking the Vicious Circle

Previous research referred to also showed that mental symptoms were relieved when people started moving. The circle can thus be broken. Now we also come back to the chambermaids and their stress when they (wrongly in their case) thought they weren’t moving enough. In the study with people with depression, 85% indicated they wanted to move more, and 80% thought they would also benefit mentally from it. However, this was hardly addressed in the treatment process. Here, too, we see a difference between what they think they should do and what they actually do. This only causes an additional stress factor and all possible physical and psychological consequences thereof. As if they know they need a certain medicine but don’t get it. That’s a good recipe for feeling even worse. In the article about the link between exercise and depression, I joked that fitness fanatics can already become ‘depressed’ if they miss one workout. But still, this is comparable. These are all cases where you feel like you’ve shortchanged yourself. Don’t wait until your mind is ready to start moving. Get moving, and the mind will follow naturally.

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

Music gets you moving. That’s just an innate quality. It’s a shame that we often suppress that tendency to automatically move to music at a later age. When I look at Theresa May, I kind of understand that, 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 shabby gray tracksuit, walking into a butcher shop to use slaughtered pigs as punching bags, and running until I reach a big staircase that I then sprint up to cheer at the top.

Motivation and Dissociation

The above is the personal example I gave of the motivating power of music. However, the article further mainly discussed research on the effect of music on athletic performance. It turned out that especially endurance athletes can benefit from music. These improved performances are not only caused by the fact that the music pumps you up. Music is also capable of mentally disconnecting you from your physical action. Dissociation in this respect means that, for example, you’ve been walking with music on for a while and suddenly can’t consciously remember the last few hundred meters you 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: Choose Your Workout Buddy Carefully

People are often advised to exercise and train together with others. ‘Enjoyable’, ‘social’, ‘support’ are terms often associated with 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 workout buddy can work positively and negatively, both in terms of how often you exercise and how you exercise. Example: You agree to go for a walk together three nights a week. The positive of such an agreement is that maybe on the third night you didn’t feel like it, but you still feel obligated to go. The risk of such an agreement is that your workout buddy doesn’t feel like it that night and just stays home. Are you then someone who goes for a walk alone, or do you also stay home? So choose your workout buddy wisely. If you still have to break up with your workout buddy, we also have some tips for that.

References

1. Crum AJ, Langer EJ. Mind-set matters: exercise and the placebo effect. Psychol Sci. 2007 Feb;18(2):165-71. PubMed PMID: 17425538.
2. thelancet.com
3. Carter SE, Draijer R, Holder SM, Brown L, Thijssen DHJ, Hopkins ND. Regular walking breaks prevent the decline in cerebral blood flow associated with prolonged sitting. J Appl Physiol (1985). 2018 Jun 7. doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00310.2018. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 29878870.
4. Prolonged sitting-induced leg endothelial dysfunction is prevented by fidgeting Takuma Morishima, Robert M. Restaino, Lauren K. Walsh, Jill A. Kanaley, Paul J. Fadel, and Jaume Padilla American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology 2016 311:1, H177-H182
5. Reiff C, Marlatt K, Dengel DR. Difference in caloric expenditure in sitting versus standing desks. J Phys Act Health. 2012 Sep;9(7):1009-11. PubMed PMID: 22971879.
6. Tigbe WW, Granat MH, Sattar N, Lean ME. Time spent in sedentary posture is associated with waist circumference and cardiovascular risk. Int J Obes (Lond). 2017 Mar 7. doi: 10.1038/ijo.2017.30. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 28138134.
7. J.N. Morris, J.A. Heady, P.A.B. Raffle, C.G. Roberts, J.W. Parks, CORONARY HEART-DISEASE AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY OF WORK, The Lancet, Volume 262, Issue 6795, 1953, Pages 1053-1057, ISSN 0140-6736, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(53)90665-5.
8. Carol A. Janney, Kathryn Fant Brzoznowski, Caroline R. Richardson, Richard R. Dopp, Michelle L. Segar, Dara Ganoczy, Ann J. Mooney, Lauren Emerson, Marcia Valenstein. Moving Towards Wellness: Physical activity practices, perspectives, and preferences of users of outpatient mental health service. General Hospital Psychiatry, 2017; 49: 63