"Hello everyone! I’m Faith Aguilar, Registered Nurse for the Virtual Care team at Oscar. Today we will be discussing the benefits of physical activity.
Incorporating physical activity into your daily life can have many health benefits such as promoting better sleep, improved mood, reducing stress, lowering your blood pressure, and helping to control your blood glucose levels.
This sounds awesome so why isn’t everyone being more physically active? Well, it’s tough to get started. Today, we’re going to talk about a few ways that we can make small changes to help incorporate physical activity into our daily lives.
Get ready the night before, find a partner, and make a commitment
When you prepare your clothes or your exercise gear, your workout shoes the night before or in advance, it’s a lot easier and it saves a lot of time to help you get started for the next day.
Also, if you’re nervous about starting alone, have a partner to walk with — not even that you have to see in-person — that you can call or text helps you to be more motivated and helps with accountability as well.
Make a commitment to yourself, write it down, and keep the note somewhere where you can see it daily, such as on a calendar. You’ve written it down, already blocked out space, that helps with accountability also and puts you in a mindframe of "it’s written down, I see it, I’m going to get it done.”
Choosing to take the stairs
Climbing stairs strengthens your muscles, improves your balance and burns tons of calories. If you climb only two flights of stairs every day you would see weight loss of six pounds within three months. Make the decision, choose the stairs.
Take a walk around the block
There’s something to be said about getting outdoors, being with nature, letting the sun hit your back, feeling the breeze, watching the colors change on the leaves, looking at flowers — it’s wonderful.
Take a walk down your neighborhood to help strengthen your lower body. It also helps because it’s easy access. You’re right out the door, you can make it a habit. Every time you walk, you can challenge yourself, maybe starting off with half a block. The next day, try a full block.
You can also challenge yourself with time. Today, it may take you twenty minutes, the next day it may take eighteen minutes.
Whatever you do, as long as you’re outside, it helps to instill consistency and it will make you stronger.
Park far away from your destination
If you’re going to your local grocery store, it may be tempting to wait for the space right in the front, but try to park further away.
This way you’ll have a double win because ou are giving up your parking space to someone who may really need it. Also, by parking further away, you’re also getting your steps in and helping to lubricate your joints and strengthen muscles.
If you are an Oscar member that has signed up in the Oscar App (opens in new tab) for our member perks program, you’ll earn rewards for your steps.
Stand up and stretch often
This can be tough because we’re zoned in, we’re working, focused on our work. Our postures, shoulders and necks tend to stiffen up.
Every twenty minutes or so, stand up from your seat, take a few deep breaths, relax your shoulders, stretch your back and move your focus away from your laptop or computer to glance around and change our view for a few moments.
It helps our posture, our lungs, and gives us a quick mental restart.
Try not to eat lunch at your desk
We’re all guilty of this. We’re hungry but we have an email or a few emails that just can’t wait.
Try hard to give your mind and body a chance to relax, refresh by getting up even if you have lunch in the next room.
Step outside for a quick walk — aything to change the scenery to give your mind and body a break and get al little physical activity in during your lunchtime.
This helps prevent burnout and breaks up the monotony of a long day’s work.
Do-it-Yourself
You can apply this to housework or yard work. Mowing the lawn is great - it can burn up to 300 calories in 60 minutes. That is a good way to stay physically active!
Mopping, sweeping, vacuuming, dusting all keep your upper and lower body strong and can help you burn calories. Do-it-yourself activities can help with keeping your home looking nice and clean as well as benefiting you mentally and physically.
If it helps to put on a little music, just to get you energized and going, crank it up and get moving!
Replace your social media break with a few minutes of body strengthening
This is going to be challenging, but I know you can do this. Usually when you have a little break away from work, you are tempted to grab your phone and scroll through social media, but the more you scroll, time seems to fly by. Before you know it, you’ve spent twenty or thirty minutes scrolling through social media.
Instead of grabbing our phones when it’s break time, we’re going to choose to stand up and do some body strengthening exercises. I’m going to demonstrate a few exercises that you can do to strengthen your leg muscles.
Body strengthening exercises
Grab a chair — a desk chair, dining room chair, whatever you have in the kitchen — to get started. This will help with our leg muscles. Stand in front of the chair. You may have a chair that has armrests on the side, but this time we’re not going to use the armrests, we’re going to try to do everything with our leg muscles. You can also try to keep your abs tight and you’re going to lower yourself onto the chair and then rise back up. Try to do this ten times if you can. If not, no big deal, do it fives times or three times. Whatever you are capable of.
Another example to strengthen your leg muscles involves holding onto the back of the chair for balance and bring your leg in and out. Try to do this ten times if you can on each side. You don’t need weights, you can just use your own body weight.
Other exercises to try
You can also do jumping jacks or sit ups.
You can start with a small amount, whatever you’re able to that day and it will help to strengthen your muscles.
Keep encouraging yourself, keep a positive mindframe and try to be better than the day before. Every little bit helps.
Play with your children and pets
Kick a rubber ball back and forth, throw a frisbee, play catch. This is a triple win!
You’re getting your physical activity in, burning calories, spending quality time with your family and pets, and you’re also being a great example for your family.
When they see you moving around and having fun, they’re going to want to do the same.
Congratulate yourself on wins big and small
This is really important because it’s tough to incorporate new changes into your life.
The more that you can be consistent every day about walking or whatever it is you’re doing to become physically active, then the better chance you have of making it a habit. Even if you only decide to walk twice in one week rather than three times, it’s still a win, it’s still progression so congratulate yourself for doing a good job and keep trying again the next day.
Give yourself a chance to make the best choice for you every day.
I hope this information was helpful. Be on the lookout for our next video. We’re going to be discussing cooking tips that will help us on our journey to become our best selves."
This content does not constitute medical advice and is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advice, including diagnosis or treatment. Contact your physician with any questions you may have regarding COVID-19 or your personal health. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, dial 911 for immediate assistance.
*Virtual Providers are employed by Oscar Medical Group and are not employed by Oscar Insurance.
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