Heart Research UK Healthy Heart Tip, written by the Health Promotion and Education Team at Heart Research UK
Healthy Heart Tip: Get On Your Feet
Thursday 27th April is ‘On Your Feet Britain’, a national activity awareness day to promote the benefits of sitting less and moving more.
Decreasing the amount of time we spend sitting can contribute to reducing your risk of developing heart diseases. The key is to make small, sustainable changes to your usual daily routines, making more movement and less sitting easy to achieve.
Here we detail a few ways you can do this:
Walking meetings and phone calls
Lots of us work at desks most days, making movement difficult. Challenge your organisation to allow walking meetings. Especially as the weather warms up it can be a great way to get in some extra steps.
If you don’t have a desk-based job or attend meetings, you could still take every phone call you receive or make outside and walk while chatting.
Set movement reminders
We live in a world full of technologies we can use to our advantage to help improve our health. Your smart phone can be a fantastic tool to encourage you to stand more and take part in movement.
Set up multiple daily alarms throughout your day to remind you to stand up and move. This could look like four alarms spread out throughout the day and when the alarm goes off you pop your trainers on and go for a 10-minute walk.
Look for opportunities for movement
If we spend a bit of energy looking for opportunities to move more, we can usually find them. For example, if you are out shopping, take the stairs rather than the elevator or get off the bus a stop early and walk a little bit further.
If you drive for the daily school drop off, park a little further away and get moving with the kids before school. It doesn’t have to be lots of time spent in one go, just little chunks of time that add up throughout the day.
For more tips on how to stay healthy, sign up for our weekly healthy tips at www.heartresearch.org.uk/health-tips.
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