While often considered as an aspect of health distinct from our mental and social experiences, physical fitness is inextricably intertwined with overall well-being. In order to live our best life each day, we must make time for fitness. Fitness does not need to exist within traditional workout confines, and can (and should) be woven into our day-to-day life.

Got A Second?

For many, fitness occupies isolated moments in our lives. The thrice weekly workout, morning run, and/or pickup basketball league are helpful ways to allocate hours toward specific fitness pursuits. However, these do-by-design fitness schedules do not always fit into our lives, and may present considerable barriers to fitness. An overloaded schedule will also create negative associations with fitness, further pushing us from healthy living.

Fitness should be interwoven into our day-to-day life. To do so, we should focus our efforts on brief, regular movements that are designed to learn how our bodies can move rather than outdoing our friend’s lifting records. Fitness focused on understanding movement through micro assessments that fit into our regular days rather than isolated workout experiences will yield increased accessibility to fitness, promoting more sustainable exercise patterns and an increased interest in the prospect of fitness.

Physical Fitness is a Continuous Goal (Requiring Continued Effort)

We are most successful in our pursuit of durable and athletic bodies when we continuously pursue fitness with an eye to improve. Our bodies develop with continued feedback and study, with “use it or lose it” accurately reflecting how we build and retain our physiques (remember, though, take a brake if you need it!).

Fitness is most commonly scheduled into our life as its own unique event which needs to be pursued in isolation (ex. gym sessions, sports leagues, etc.). While it’s important to give fitness its own time, it’s easy to get knocked off track when fitness exists only by itself.

This is especially true once we have missed a few sessions. After missing some workouts, fitness can quickly move from a priority to an optional endeavor, making us even less inclined to want to pursue it.

Scheduling Fitness Blocks is Time Consuming and Stressful

In order for fitness to have its own designated time each day, we need to block it off. This requires us to put it into our schedule, plan what we need to bring, coordinate a routine, and plan the rest of our life events around making the gym work. Needless to say, this takes time.

Beyond presenting time demands, when something exists as its own isolated and unique experience, anticipation builds around its start and completion. In other words, scheduling fitness into specific time blocks throughout our weeks can create and augment anticipatory anxiety, building mental barriers to exercise.

Some find that scheduling fitness is helpful for them, as it automates their fitness requirements and makes the event more frictionless. If that’s you, terrific! However, many others dread workouts each time they draw nearer on their schedules. This dread can make working out feel like a negative experience each time (even if you enjoy the workout in the end).

Fitness can more easily fit into our lives if we recognize that it is a part of everything we do rather than something that must be pursued in isolation.

Fitness and Day-to-Day Life Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

Fitness dictates each movement we make throughout daily life. Our walking endurance influences where we travel as a pedestrian, and our ability to lift structures how we organize our homes and offices. Fitness impacts our work performance, happiness, and social lives.

For some reason, when we pursue fitness, we tend to detach it from everything else that makes up our life. Fitness does not need to be studied as something separate from everyday life. While dedicated fitness sessions are generally good and useful for specific goals, I believe fitness is best achieved when at least partially pursued and studied as it relates to our regular day-to-day activities.

Fitness Should Be Built into Daily Life

We can most sustainably pursue fitness by building it into our daily life. This building process must consider fitness’s smaller actions and be built around making each movement safer and more effective.

Fitness isn’t just the hour long workout or Sunday beer league. It exists far beyond youth sports, gym classes, and run clubs. Fitness functions as our fuel tank for life’s movements, and can be effectively trained when it is considered in many of the brief actions we do daily.

We move all the time. Whether we’re running to catch our dogs (my dog bolts for the woods sometimes just to see what I’ll do) or popping up a flight of stairs, we move often every day.

Why is it then that we often only consider our fitness as it relates to gym numbers or push-pull routines?

Fitness can be continually studied as we are moving and doing. Small, regular movements and efforts to consider them can yield positive growth and fitness trends. The best part? It’s even easier than traditional fitness training.

Fitness is Easier When Built into Everyday Life

Traditional fitness often requires us to build a routine, pack a bag, change into fitness gear, drive to a facility, compete to use the machines we want, clean each machine, pack our bags to go, drive home, and shower for each fitness session. Even with home workouts and online fitness resources readily available, traditional gym routines often beg us to block hours off each day to pump iron.

It’s easy to see how fitness is more accessible when built into everyday life. Even if just used as a supplement to traditional workouts, building fitness into everyday life offers us easy ways to learn how we move, test techniques, improve our balance, and move more regardless of our environments. This makes it easier to keep progressing even if we have to skip a workout, are between gyms, or suffer an injury that limits how we can train.

Deliberate acts and efforts to understand how we move result in accessible fitness practices that add up to serious growth and learning.

Small Acts of Fitness Add Up

Regular activity increases the amount of calories we burn in a typical day. NASM, a leading fitness certification purveyor, estimates that changes as simple as standing up instead of sitting down for work can result in dramatic calorie utilization differences (and corresponding pounds of weight loss over the work year). NASM considers these calorie benefits in non exercise activities like standing or moving around, and the benefits can only improve through deliberate short-duration fitness activities built into our days.

What happens if instead of sitting down all day, we mix in a minute or two to balance on one leg? What if we practice bodyweight squats while drafting an email, or mix in a push-up or two while we wait for a call back?

While these motions may not seem like much, each time we take an opportunity to improve our understanding of basic movement provides both a chance to expend energy and to refine our abilities to move. You’d be impressed with just how easily these benefits start to compound.

Constant Fitness Testing Can Produce Quality Results

Practice makes perfect. What if, instead of practicing for a sport or activity, we constantly built little sessions devoted to learning how we can move?

Consider this Kobe Bryant clip.

Kobe describes his practice of building more training sessions into his day by starting earlier. He describes his deliberate approach to structuring days so he could learn, break, study, and train again more times during one day. He credits this style of learning with creating exponential separation between the practitioner and competitors.

Kobe was an elite basketball player who conducted hours of professional athletic training each day. However, his training philosophy is effective for improving anything we want to learn, especially when it comes to basic fitness.

We can train like Kobe by opening more opportunities in our day to study basic movement. Instead of having one exercise session before or after work a few times a week, we can find times throughout our days to practice movement and increase physical activities. We already know we need to take breaks during our days, and these breaks can be more efficiently utilized to squeeze extra training into our lives.

How to Make Time for Fitness in Everyday Life

Use Micro Assessments to Test Movement Throughout Your Day

Micro Assessments are brief, focused evaluations designed to measure specific competencies or understanding of particular topics.

I find that I have been most successful in developing and maintaining strength and stability along expansive ranges of motion through the use of micro assessments. They have been particularly helpful during busy periods of work when it is hard to maintain a consistent time for exercise.

Throughout my day, I test various ranges of motion through the use of micro assessments. I often mix assessments into tasks I’m already doing, adding little time to my task while providing insight into how I move.

For example, when I am grabbing my bag before heading out to work, I might take a few moments to feel how my forearm, upper arm, shoulder, and back engage to grab the weight, load it onto my back, and shift my center of balance.At the end of the day, I might use that same backpack to do some weighted pull ups when I’m back home (on my power tower, discussed more here).

Micro assessments don’t require any weight, and can be anything from doing a controlled bodyweight squat at your desk to testing your finger and hand control as you actively move it thought various ranges of motion (considered further here. While testing, you can further improve your understanding of hand movement —and body control in general— by using touch).

With little added time demands and an endless ability to improve how we move, there is little reason not to mix micro assessments into everyday life.

Walk With a Purpose

Anywhere under 4000 steps in a day is considered a low number of steps.

That’s a lot of opportunities to learn how you learn how you walk each day.

As I’ve contended earlier, walking requires a lot more detail than we typically credit. Each step requires a careful consideration of the walking surface and our body control, yet we largely treat the act of walking as an automated process that needs no study for improvement. Any slope change, walking obstruction, and slippery spill can quickly alter how you need to move to avoid falling.

While we don’t need to carefully study each step we take (and it’d be mentally exhausting to even try), we do benefit from taking a few moments throughout the day to think about how we walk. When I’m walk, I like to ask myself:

• Am I standing upright?
• Are my feet landing firmly on the ground?
• Where on my feet do I strike the ground?
• Are my feet straight?
• Where is my center of balance?
• Am I driving through your toes?

Each time we slow down and pay attention to our typical walking form, we offer ourselves the chance to study it and improve. With so many steps each day, it really helps to take a few of them every now and then to make sure we are continuously developing our form and walking more sustainably.

Take Each Stair

No, don’t literally take every stair you come across.

Rather, act deliberately and pay attention when you go up the stairs.

• How are you approaching the step?
• Where do you land on the step with your foot?
• Do you drive through the step with your toes?
• How smoothly are you landing on the next step?

While not as common as walking on flat ground, stairs are a frequent feature of everyday life that can provide a lot of insight into our body’s ability to move. I enjoy the opportunity (and ability) to hop up a few stairs on a wide stair case, and I also appreciate practicing quickly controlling my steps up and down each individual stair.

Paying attention when we use the stairs is important even if only to avoid falling down them. A little extra effort still provides great rewards in terms of improving how we can move as a whole.

Conclusion

Deliberate efforts to make time for fitness help us live safe, healthy, and active lives. It can be hard to make time for fitness, but each effort contributes toward building a more durable body. I find that I can best make time for fitness through the use of micro assessments. These brief moments dedicated to studying how my body moves help me build more workout opportunities into my every day life.

Better yet, micro assessments help me improve each every time I move so that I am continuously keeping my body in order. There is always more to learn about how to move, and it can be hard to make time for fitness, but regular, deliberate efforts will place us closer to fitness each day.

Questions? Comments? Recommended resources? Let me know!

-G

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