INTRODUCING THIS WEEK’S 5X5 HABIT – WALKING
💡 CONCEPT: Sleekgeek 5×5 Habit = a new habit each week to do for 5 minutes or less, 5 times a week.
This week’s habit is WALKING 👇
🎯 MISSION:
Go for a deliberate (at least) 5-minute walk today (and every day for at least 5 days).
Share with us a photo or selfie of you on your walk in the comments of this post on Facebook DAILY to be eligible for the R500 prize!
The winner will be announced on Monday along with the next 5×5 Habit.
📢 MORE INFO:
Even if you go to the gym for 1 hour a day and do that 7 days a week…
If you sit on your bum behind a computer, in the car, at a table, on the couch, or in your bed for the remaining 23 hours of your day then you are STILL sedentary.
Moving more throughout the day is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to improve your well-being.
✅ It helps reduce body fat.
✅ It improves glycemic control (better blood glucose control and more stable insulin levels).
✅ It improves triglyceride levels and lowers blood pressure.
✅ It’s good for your brain, (cognition, memory, academic performance, creativity, and logic tests).
✅ It reduces stress and boosts immune function.
✅ It prevents falls in the elderly.
✅ It gives you a chance to think and can be a form of meditation.
✅ It keeps your buttocks engaged with the world, because excessive sitting causes glute inactivation and atrophy which brings about back pain, instability, and reduces strength.
✅ It’s well tolerated by people with arthritis and many other health conditions who might not otherwise be able to exercise.
So how about we bump walking more a little higher up our priority list?
🏃♀️ HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU WALK?
For this 5×5 Habit, we just want you to go for a deliberate and intentional walk for at least 5 minutes a day.
What we mean by this is don’t count the walking that you normally do as part of your daily life. Don’t count the walking you accidentally did or had to do. Focus on actually setting aside time in your day to go for a walk to deliberately increase your daily step count.
In a perfect world, we would like these quick and easy 5-minute walks to eventually expand into you doing longer or more frequent walks.
If you want a bit more information to guide your future walks, we know research for public health has established that:
- Those who take 5,000 steps a day or less are considered sedentary and at a higher risk for obesity, disease, and early death.
- Those who take 10,000 steps a day or more are considered active and typically have less body fat and better overall health.
For some people, 10,000 steps might seem ridiculously easy (especially if you have an active job) but for most people, it’s rather high at the beginning (and for some, it’s just about impossible).
Even us at Sleekgeek spend most of our time working from home behind our computers or on our phones… If we didn’t push ourselves to deliberately get out and walk more, we would likely only get 2,000 – 3,000 steps a day on average.
So we understand, it’s challenging! (But do-able with some effort.)
Start with just 5 minutes a day and see where that leads you.
