How to Exercise Without any Real Effort and Aid Weight Loss

Everyone knows how important exercise is in remaining healthy, or when following a weight loss plan. It raises the metabolic rate, burns calories and generally assists in promoting fat loss. Trouble is, we often don’t want to exercise, or lack motivation to exercise. The word exercise brings back horrendous memories of charging round the football pitch, or cross country at school. Sound familiar?

So what can we do to help ourselves without too much effort?

Well one of the main things to give yourself a fighting chance of starting and as importantly, keeping up exercise, is to make sure you are going to enjoy it, and not just think of it as ‘exercise’ You need to trick yourself into exercising by adding in activities to your daily schedule. This way you won’t feel like it is hard work to exercise, but rather enjoy it as part of your daily routine.

Here are some ideas for you:-

Shopping – when you visit large shopping malls how about walking up the stairs and ban the escalators or elevator.
Park the car a little further from the mall than usual.
Speed up your walking pace while window shopping.
If supermarket shopping, exaggerate the arm movements when stretching to reach the goods on the top shelve, walk up one side of the aisle and down the other (which will double your walking) instead of darting from side to side.
Whether you are pushing your trolley round the super market, trying on clothes or just walking around you are definitely using up more calories than if you had stayed at home watching the telly!

Gardening – this can be a fantastic way to use up a few more calories and get daily exercise. Just clearing your garden of the autumn leaves and debris, think how much bending and moving this uses. If you feel energetic how about digging over the borders, this is great exercise for your muscles and you can use up to 600 calories in one hour of digging.
Once the light evenings are on us, why don’t you spend half an hour or so out in the garden. There are always plenty of things to do in a garden, even if it just weeding, and clearing up.

Play with children - if you have younger children or even grand children that enjoy roller blading, why not join them for a while? This will give you exercise and also allow you to spend some quality time with the children. If they are not into roller blading, how about taking them down to the local park with a frisbee, or a ball? This alone can use up a couple of hundred calories as well as give you fairly painless exercise.

Dogs – this is a fairly obvious one – Rover needs his exercise. How about walking a little further each day, or if someone else in the family takes the dog out, why don’t you go with them sometimes? When your dog chases after his ball, run along with him – they think this is a great new game, and see what good it is doing you.

Dancing – get dolled up at the weekend and go off to a dance and enjoy yourself. Whatever type of dance you prefer, whether it is ballroom, jazz or disco you will burn up calories whilst having a great time.

If you don’t go out to dances, and have a modern games console, how about buying your self a dance mat? These are great fun and you can use them in privacy, or set up tournaments with friends or families.

Work round the house - I don’t think any of us really like doing housework, but it does burn calories. Why not give your house a good spring (or summer/winter) clean? Use lots of bends and stretches and you can burn around 450 calories in an hour. Walk a bit faster when you go round with the vacuum, bend to do under the furniture, stretch to do the ceiling – see how easy it is to add exercise into boring housework?

If you are more into DIY, there is usually a room in the house that needs a lick of paint, done properly this can use up around 300 calories an hour.

Cycling – this again is a fairly obvious way of increasing your exercise, and can be a lot of fun too. If you live in a City or Town it can often be faster to hop on your bike, rather than sit around in your car whilst the traffic slowly moves off.
Go off at the weekend with your partner and/or children. It can sometimes be daunting riding around streets near to your home, so why not buy a rack for the car? Take off into the local countryside for a few hours. Not only will you be seeing new areas, but you will be using up around 500 calories per hour of cyling.

Walking – is a really good form of exercise, and it is an easy thing to add into your daily routine. Park a little further from the shops and walk the rest, get off the bus a stop before you need to and walk the rest of the way. If you work in an office that has somebody visit with sandwiches/snacks to buy at lunchtime, why not go out and walk to the local shop instead?
Use the stairs when you can instead of the lifts.
Take the dog and/or children for a slightly longer walk than usual.
Walk to the local shops for that small item you have forgotten, instead of getting your car out –better for the environment as well.

I hope this has given you a few ideas of how you can add exercise into your daily routine fairly easily.

Cat is the founder of The Weight Loss Site, a fairly new site that has been set up to give people who are trying to achieve their own personal weight loss goal some personal help and advice.

Please feel free to use this article, but leave it as it is and with all details including links intact

1. Prev:Low Carb Diets: Just How Safe Are They?
2. Next:Girls Watch Out! Smoking Can Make You Obese