Sedentary Lifestyle…Work From Home…Exercises
If you are a deterministic person who can allocate the time, put an effort to do exercises with out a miss then you are great and this article is not for you. If you are averted to the physical activity, living a sedentary lifestyle and would like to improve your physical strength from current levels and then this is probably for you.
Do you want to break your sedentary lifestyle and build a body with no cost, no time waste, no gym, no equipment, no rules, no weights, no timings etc…? If yes, then check out this. I just said above statement to attract you, but after reading this article, probably you can judge if it is true or not :).
The idea is simple, so obvious and no brainer. As we already know, if work life is sedentary, doctors suggest to take a halt from work for every 1 hr and roam around for some time . What if we do exercises in these gaps instead of just walking around for couple of minutes. That's it. Its all started with this thought.
Why i thought this:
I have a habit of going to gym and i have been doing it from long time. However, last 5 or 6 years, the consistency is not there. After covid started, it became very difficult to maintain the consistency for obvious reasons.
During covid time, I was not able to go to even our apartment gym regularly which is just upstairs. I downloaded home exercises apps and tried to follow. After 3 months i checked the app calendar and i can see an average i worked out once per week.
I realized this is not a correct way and thought to do some thing else which should be sustainable, consistent and then resulted this method. To compliment that, i also wanted to remove all my psychological barriers(i feel bored even wearing shoe for gym) with respect to body building and not to follow any rules or restrictions. There should not be any rules at all. If i want to do i do 30 reps at a time, if i don't like i just do only 4 reps. No warmups, no dress code, no format etc.. Sometimes, i do bicep curls while walking casually. There are no restrictions at all.
I did some rough calculation to find the difference in going to gym in a separate timeslot and exercising at home with this method. If i go to gym, an average 45 min to 1 hr per day, each day one body part, with 4*4 sets, each set around 12 reps totaling 16 sets and for 5 days a week its 80 sets/week. Now in this method, an average 4 times(each time 2 sets) which is 8 sets/day, doing it 7 days instead of 5 days, totaling 56 sets/week. Not bad. Almost similar results with this method.
There are so many motivational books and speeches that will tell us various methods or techniques such as try to start small and slowly build a momentum etc. and I fully agree with them. But I want to take that to next level/step. Why should we even think of small or big, less or heavy? There shouldn’t be any measurements. Only restriction(if you call it) should be doing it consistently like eating food every day and this should be as consistent as eating food.
If you are sitting 10 hrs for work in a day and take a halt for every 2 hrs then you would end up doing exercise 6 times. If do it for 5 min. for every halt, then its a total 30 min workout in a day. Whatever you do other than this like walking, playing etc is a bonus.
Reasons people are not consistent:
I personally believe for exercises, consistency is more important than intensity. There are so many reasons like physical, economical, psychological issues, that will make people not interested in physical activity. Checkout the reasons here.
Why this might be sustainable:
- No warm ups
- No format or pattern or rules
- No heavy weights
- No timings(except just after eating food)
- No wastage of time
- No separate time slot or exercise time
- No psychological barriers
- No separate space/place
- No equipment(except two dumbbells, may be not necessary for all)
- No cost
- No diet restrictions(If you are an average eater)
How i do it:
I have ordered two 10 kg dumbbells' from amazon to try this on my self. I do one body part/day, 2 sets at each halt and for 4 or 5 times in a day. It comes around 10 or 12 min per day. You can do better than me.
I also do some ab exercises couple of times in a day some thing similar like here in the video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ecBJPl7BRQ&ab_channel=CarolineJordan).
I also walk for around 30 min. or around 3 km per day. The stats shows, all cause mortality risk is reduced if you walk between 3300(2.6km) to 11000(9km) steps/day (https://youtu.be/J6nW55kH7Do). The optimal looks like 7500 steps/day(6km).
For some reason, if i have to go out entire day, i would do 4 sets before going out and do 4 sets after reaching home.
Benefits seems to be:
- More than 3 liters of water intake(even in Bangalore weather)
- Muscle strength increased
- Consistency in doing exercises
- No fatigue
- Very less sinus attacks(Used to get next day when i do intensive gym)
- No diet restrictions
Weight Loss??
Consider if we are doing 30 min. conditional exercises with 4 MET and 3km walk with 4 MET, then the approx. calories expenditure is as follows:
Note: Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET) — One MET equals 1 calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour. One MET is equivalent to the amount of energy a person would expend sitting quietly and doing nothing.
Calories required for an urban person in a day is around 2100(for men). If 75kg weight person just sitting idle(1 MET) in a day spends around 1800 kcals(75 calories *1MET*24).
As we are doing exercises + walk for an hour/day with 4 MET, the calories spent are: 75*1*4 = 300. So, overall you are spending around 2100 calories(1800 idle + 300) in a day. So there is a no weight gain or loss.
But if your Energy Intake is equal to Energy expenditure and these daily exercises are extra calorie expenditure then with the current setup you might be reducing weight as below(assuming around 7000 kcal is 1kg):
weight reduction in kg = (weight*hrs*MTE*days)/7000
The rate of change in weight is around 40 gm per day which is constant. But this is not correct because your weight will likely plateau at some point, even if you continue the same exercise pattern.
For more predictive mathematical dynamic weight loss models, you can check the article Predictive Mathematical Models of Weight Loss.
Looks like there is a correlation between more calorie intake with exercise intervention. Check below table, the data shows with the exercise intervention, the calorie intake seems to be higher than normal.
If you are looking for a weight reduction, you should consider dietary weight loss interventions and that is out of scope here.
How is it going:
Its been six months, the consistency is excellent. Probably, at most, i would have missed 10 or 12 days. No weight loss or gain but i guess the muscle strength might have increased around 20%.
Caution:
Please note, i have more than a decade experience in moderate weight lifting. May be that is the reason, it is working out for me. I would suggest to start with very less weights, including warmups and a doctor consultation before attempting this method or any exercise pattern.