Exercise with a purpose

Move your body for a reason beyond just moving your body

Like many people, I’ve laughed at the widely circulated photos of escalators leading into gyms. Now I know this is partly about accessibility — which is good! — but I also imagine there are people who take those escalators and then log 30 minutes on the stair climbing machines. In our sedentary world, exercise is often an “extra” thing — removed from our ordinary actions. 

Contrast this with our ancestors, who didn’t have the option to cut exercise out of their lives. They had to walk places and cut wood. We can all be glad that washing clothes no longer involves wringing them without the benefit of labor-saving devices. 

The problem is that when exercise isn’t doing anything other than moving one’s body, it can start to feel superfluous in a busy schedule. One way around that is to find ways to exercise with a purpose. 

When it has to happen…

Sometimes life delivers these. I know someone who never had time to exercise…until she moved to an apartment that’s a 15 minute walk from her train station. Magically, 30 minutes of brisk walking appeared in her schedule, every day, Monday to Friday. Folks who adopt dogs likewise often wind up hauling themselves outside and around the block with their pets multiple times per day. In her book Bored and Brilliant, Manoush Zomorodi famously talks about finding that the only thing that calmed her colicky baby was to walk, fast, with the stroller for miles and miles. Needless to say she had no trouble losing any pregnancy weight! 

But many of us have to get creative. 

One option is to literally “run” an errand — or at least walk or bike it. At my old house, I’d often walk to the post office or the library as an afternoon break. I’d sometimes run the 4 miles round trip between the old house and the new house to check on the progress of our construction project. Even if you normally drive kids to school, if it is possible to walk you might do that twice a week or so. You could walk there and run home. 

You could turn a normal neighborhood walk into something useful by bringing gloves and a bag and picking up trash. Or bring a bag with a snack, walk somewhere, have a picnic, and walk home (or back to work). 

Make it social

I’ve found that exercising with people also makes it feel more purposeful. After all, I’m not just running to run (or even worse, running on a treadmill and not getting anywhere). I’m running to spend time with someone. 

Or hey, if you’re looking to do some weight training — and you have small kids — coming up with a game that involves picking them up is going to give you some big biceps! Of course they might not want to stop, which could lead to injury so…be careful. 

In any case, when exercise feels like extra, it’s easy to cut. When it has a purpose, then it feels more like a worthwhile pursuit. Most of us aren’t going to switch careers to become lumberjacks. But it still might be possible to make exercise a little less boring.