Distinctions

Activity and exercise are not the same thing.  Understanding this can increase our fitness.  We need both in our lives.

Activity, in the sense I mean, is pretty much any movement we do.  Gardening, housework, shopping, and such are good examples.  Increasing our activity level can help us toward fitness by burning more calories than, say, sitting on the couch.  What we are tracking when we shoot for 10,000 steps per day is activity level.

Exercise, on the other hand, is a bit more work.  Our muscles need to end up tired and/or sore.  We need to get breathless.  We need to sweat.  This is where the real changes in our bodies come from.  When you get in those 30 minutes of elevated heart rate, you know you have exercised.

Sometimes we confuse activity with exercise.  When we go to the gym and walk on the treadmill while reading, we may think we are exercising.  For some of us, that kind of pace is enough to get our heart rates up and IS in fact exercise.  For others, it’s just activity, better than reading on the couch, but not enough to really increase our fitness level.

Go for it!  Get active and get exercise!

Keep Taking Out the Garbage

Not surprisingly, as a person embedded in our culture, I have too much stuff.  We all do unless we have consciously decided to go minimalist.  I don’t aspire to having only 50 possessions, or 25, or none, but I do want to have less clutter.  Some time ago when I was creating a goal list, I found that I could summarize pretty much everything I wanted in this phrase:  keep taking out the garbage.

This applies to fitness, of course.  I am sure I am not the only one who needs to think, continually, about taking the garbage out of my food choices.  Changing our body fat percentages comes down to taking out the excess garbage from our bodies by building muscle.

Taking out the garbage is work.  Sometimes it’s smelly and messy.  But if we keep doing it, we find ourselves in a much more pleasant place.

When adding water is not a good idea...

I have spent the last week or so without my trusty Fitbit.  It was my own fault for assuming it was more waterproof than it was.  I took it swimming and it became unhappy.  My replacement model, one that is allowed to go swimming, should be here soon.

Being a little old-school anyway, I use a combination of old and new technology to track my activity.  I print my workout sheets and make notes with an actual pen.  But I found that I missed the small accountability of steps.  As I’ve said before, there is nothing magic about 10,000 steps per day, but it remains a useful guideline, especially if it is easy to see whether or not it has happened.

Whether or not we choose to use a fitness tracker, we can be healthy and fit people.  Do what works, which starts with doing things.  (If water is involved, we might want to check for tolerances!)