How to trick yourself into exercising

It’s Tom here,I’m currently sitting in a cafe in the Port of Mahon with the sun on my neck, appreciating some time to enjoy a nice coffee, relax, and write this email to you.

One thing that Jess and I hear all the time from the many people that we meet or talk to via email and social media is “I just don’t have time to exercise”.

It’s a fair point.

It is, however, an excuse.

If we are honest with ourselves, truly honest, we can always find time for the things we truly value. More often than not, the people that don’t have the time for exercise are the people that don’t particularly enjoy exercising or have got out of the habit of exercising which is very easy to do when life gets busy.

How can we trick ourselves into being more active throughout the day without carving out time to go to the gym?

We ALL know the countless benefits of exercise from slowing down the physiological ageing process, increasing our energy, through to reducing the risk of early death, looking much better in a mirror and wearing smaller jeans, and so on.

But if we humans don’t like something, then, generally speaking, most of us won’t do that ‘thing’ even if it’s going to improve our lives in many ways. We naturally do things in life which bring us immediate joy and satisfaction and this mechanism is hard-wired into our programming; it takes discipline and vision to do something that’s going to yield results in a few weeks/months/years time.

So the key is to be smart and to start small.

From now on, yes from this day onwards, follow every trip to the bathroom with 5 bodyweight squats.

Watch this video to see what I mean and for technique pointers.

Basically, all a squat is, is sitting down onto a chair and standing back up again.

Sitting down is a pretty essential movement pattern I am sure you’ll agree.

All I want you to do is sit down on the toilet and stand up again 5 times either before or after you go to the bathroom.

I’d not advise doing this during 😉

If you have 7 visits to the bathroom in a day then that’s 7 times multiplied by 5 squats, equalling 35 squats.

Do this for 7 days and we will see 7 days multiplied by 35 daily squats equalling 245 squats in a week.

The figures all stack up and you’ll get stronger and more mobile and flexible as a result, as long as you are careful.

You may go to the bathroom more or fewer times but you get the idea and if you are drinking at least 2 litres of water per day on top of tea, coffee, gin etc. then you should be hydrating your system and moving.

Us humans are designed to move.

Try this out, share with others that hate exercising and let me know how you get on 🙂

Let’s start a healthy revolution.

Tom