I’m in pretty good shape.  Curiously, I keep in shape without a gym membership, and without holding to an exercise regimen (at least before I started chasing turkeys -- then I went a little 'exercise crazy').  A few years back I even took two years off of any exercise whatsoever, and still maintained great cardiovascular health and a body fat measurement of 7%. 

      The forest is a playground!                How do I do this?

Below I’m going to fully disclose the secret that keeps me in near-athletic shape without exercising regularly.  I discovered this during my three months living in the wilderness, during which I achieved the best shape of my life (again, without any planned exercise).

What Is Exercising?

Disregarding the few of us who really love exercise just for exercise’s sake, most of us exercise because the majority of our life is pretty sedentary.  We try to make up for eight or ten hours of sitting by engaging in one hour of physical activity.  This isn’t a bad tactic, except that it’s often difficult for people to get motivated (and if you skip just one day, you’re then stuck trading sixteen hours of sitting for one hour of activity), and when we repeatedly engage in repetitive exercises, it’s easy to get injured, which can put us out of exercising for weeks or months.

The best exercise would be an active lifestyle, where we engaged in a variety of physical activities throughout the day.  But since many of us feel compelled to sit during much of our day (myself, as a writer, being no exception), we have to find another way to achieve the same benefits.

The secret?  Play the 'Movement Challenge' game.

Yes, your friends may start to think you’re rather strange, but the payoffs are awesome.  You’ll develop strength, endurance, agility, speed, and cardiovascular health, and also have a lot of fun in the process.

The Game

As you move through the world, make your movement a game.  See if you can find the most difficult or challenging way to move through your environment.  You’ll quickly discover that the everyday world is full of physical challenges, if you just become aware of them.  The world will also provide you with easy ways to do most things.  Choose the challenging way!

 Here are some examples:

• When you carry groceries, carry them by holding your arms straight out to the side or directly out in front of you (bring your own canvas bags so that they can hold the weight without breaking – you may have to let the bags down quickly if your arms give out, and plastic or paper often breaks).  Don’t use a grocery cart unless absolutely necessary.  Load up those hand-baskets!

• Always park at the far end of parking lots and walk in.

• Use stairs – never elevators.  By skipping stairs or hopping up them, you can get a great leg/cardio workout.

• Take a long or circuitous route whenever you’re walking – taking sharp turns will hone your agility.

• Never sit down to put on your shoes – do it standing up, balancing on one foot, then the other.

• Instead of a chair, use a balance ball, or better yet, squat to get a great leg workout.

• Look for physical obstacles you can use.  For instance, Wal-Mart often has tall vehicle-blockers in front of their main entrance.  I’ll vault over these instead of walking by.

• Create rituals.  For instance, whenever you walk through a certain door, press your hands against it and do an isometric press.  One of my rituals is that whenever we drive anywhere in the car, I have to push it out of the driveway and down the street until the hill stops me.

• If you watch TV, sit on the floor and stretch, lift weights, do pushups or sit-ups.  Never watch TV without challenging your body.

• When you’re standing, stand on one leg, then the other.  Practice your balance.

• Hold your belly in by engaging your core.  This not only burns calories, but keeps your midsection taut.  Do it all the time, and it will become a habit.  Letting it hang out loosely is also a habit, and contributes to the breakdown of our core strength.  Better yet, practice belly dance or yoga stomach isolations, which will give you both strength and flexibility in your core.

• If you have to sit in a chair, turn it sideways and lean back a little.  Now make sure that you’re not engaging your hip flexors.  This will give you an abs workout.  You can even do mini crunches.

• This is a big one: POSTURE.  It’s said that you can tell the personality of a person solely from their posture, and it’s probably true.  Let your posture reflect your commitment to being healthy.

• In each and every moment, see if there is a more challenging way that you can sit, stand, or move through space.  Make your body a temple of activity.

Develop New Habits

Most of all, realize that we humans are creatures who gravitate toward habit.  If we allow the urges of our culture to dictate our physical habits, we will sit most of the day, usually in a slouched-over position with our bellies sagging out, totally unengaged.  Our mouth might begin to droop open, so that we no longer breathe through our noses.  Our glutes grow long, weak, and stretched out, while our hip flexors learn to remain short and tight.  Our spines are bent in strange angles, and fat grows under our flesh.  Our systems of agility, balance, strength and flexibility all rust and crack under the weight of our inactivity.  We think we’re relaxing when we sit and slouch, but really we’re putting our body under constant stress and low-grade chronic tension when we slouch or walk with bad posture.

This is so easily countered!  All it takes is developing new habits.  The guidelines above are only a beginning – create your own unique ideas, and soon you’ll find that you don’t feel right unless you are actively engaging your body.  Being healthy doesn’t have to be lots of work – it can be the easiest thing to do, as long as we don’t let ourselves slip into the habits of inactivity.

It’s time to move!

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