What are you doing in the other 23 hours?
We spend a lot of time talking about what happens during a workout.
How much weight did you lift?
How many steps did you get?
How long did you exercise?
Did you increase the number of repetitions or improve your pace?
Those things can be useful. They give us something tangible to measure and can help us see progress that isn’t always obvious from day to day, but I’ve been thinking about something else lately.
What happens during the other twenty-three hours of the day?
A tremendous amount of our health is actually being built in those hours, not just that one hour you are working out. In a round-about way, my last newsletter about your social network being a component of your health dove into this.
A workout might last thirty or sixty minutes, but the rest of your day is still influencing how you feel.
The amount of sleep (and what time you regularly go to sleep and wake up) you get affects your energy.
The food you eat provides the fuel your body needs, or reversely, it can make you feel sluggish and tired.
The time you spend sitting, walking, standing, or moving around all contributes to your overall activity.
The way you manage stress affects how well you recover and your overall energy levels, too.
Whether you get eyeballs on early morning and late afternoon sun, or not, impacts how you feel and your body functions. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2290997/)
None of those things make for a particularly dramatic workout photo, but they matter.
Sometimes we can become so focused on exercise that we accidentally turn it into the only measure of whether we’re “doing well.”
If we miss a workout, we feel like we’ve failed for the day.
However, what if you missed your workout and still took a walk?
What if you ate a nourishing dinner?
What if you went to bed early because you knew you needed the recovery?
What if you spent an hour outside with your family instead of sitting on the couch?
Did you really have an unhealthy day?
Probably not.
You simply had a day that didn’t include the particular form of movement you originally planned.
That distinction matters because your health is much bigger than your exercise routine.
Exercise is important. Strength training, cardiovascular activity, mobility work, and other forms of movement can have tremendous benefits and they are pieces of a much larger picture.
The good news is that this means you have opportunities everywhere.
You don’t have to wait for your next scheduled workout to do something positive for your health. You can take the stairs. You can walk while talking on the phone. You can spend some time outside. You can prepare a meal that leaves you feeling energized. You can turn off the television a little earlier and get some extra sleep.
None of those things replace exercise.
They simply remind us that health isn’t something that happens for one hour at the gym.
It’s something we’re building throughout the day.
If your workout doesn’t happen don’t write the entire day off!
Look at the rest of the day and ask yourself what you can do.
There are more opportunities than you might have previously recognized!
