📝 Articles Day 9

6 Easy Ways to Move More While Working from Home

At most desk jobs, you’ll be sitting down for the majority of the day. But remote work creates a particularly sedentary environment. There’s no need to walk from your front door to the car or train station. There are no aisles of cubicles to maneuver on your bathroom break or colleagues to stand around with at the water cooler. “We're just sitting there in front of the screen by ourselves,” says Mary Jayne Rogers, an exercise physiologist based in Albuquerque, who’s on the certification advisory board of the American Council on Exercise. 

This immobility has real downsides. “Prolonged sitting can increase the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure, even if you're otherwise active,” says Amy Bantham, past president of the Physical Activity Alliance. It also makes our fascia—the connective tissue that supports every structure, from our muscles and bones to our nerves and organs—stiffen up, causing ripple effects throughout the body that can impact our heart, lungs, gut, and even our brain, she says. 

Create your own commute
During the time you’d otherwise spend commuting, Bantham suggests taking a walk. She runs her own consulting business from home and likes to go for a stroll and call a friend before work. Similarly, Lindsey Bomgren, a personal trainer based in Minneapolis, gets in her steps each morning while using her phone’s talk-to-text app to draft emails and write herself notes. “I can start my day out walking, wrapping my head around my to-do list,” she says. 

Then, at the end of the day, Bomgren makes a point to do active errands around the house before her kids get home. “I’ll run up and down the stairs three times just to get laundry in, clean up, set out stuff for dinner,” she says. This gets her moving and helps her transition from work mode to mom mode.

Have an exercise snack
Taking a five-minute walk every hour has been shown to help offset the harms of sitting. Bantham says any quick movement break is worthwhile. “If you have two minutes between meetings, use those two minutes because it all counts,” she says.  

That could look like a quick set of jump squats or crunches. It could mean running up and down the stairs as fast as you can. Or, for something even simpler, Rogers recommends standing up and sitting down 10 times. 

From time.com