We need fun. Desperately. We invent endless time and money sucking stuff like gender reveal parties, promposals, and smash cakes while lamenting the lack of time to exercise. Ideas to add fun to fitness instead of creating more nonsense that keeps us from it.
Making fitness fun can be as simple as adding a single move from your favorite band. Or we can keep making it monumentally hard. Adding “Roth Kicks” to my workout adds a dash of fun.
When it comes to fitness, motivation is often missing the ‘e’ it needs to be successful. When motivation is lacking, you will also find a lack of emotion.
How you frame your activity can affect the quantity and quality of food you eat after and how hard you perceive it to be. Hint: framing it as fun makes things better for you.
When your exercise is fun, you automatically work harder (without anyone forcing you to). We’ve always known this to be true intuitively, but now research shows it.
Let’s stop forcibly cramming so much “fun” into every life event (holidays, births, weddings, pets) that life no longer is fun. Let fun movement be an essential part of your life.
As little as 50 stairs a day improves cardiovascular health (and thus brain health). Don’t sell your stairs. Even if they feel hard. Even if your knees hurt. If you do, soon you’ll find stairs out in the world almost impossible and you’ll also miss out on an everyday way to improve health.
Make health behaviors easier by keeping them in-the-moment and front-of-mind. How to use cognitive reframing to either enjoy a few drinks when you want to and say “no” to a ‘glass of diabetes’ when you don’t want to.
The OG snake oil was…snake oil. Now it’s available just about everywhere and comes in endless forms. It seems like everything is snake oil. But the fundamentals of a healthy and happy life haven’t changed.
Reflections on repeating the Presidential Physical Fitness Test of my youth in my 50’s and what this means for fun fitness.
