What is incidental exercise and how can we use it to better our health?

What is incidental exercise?

Incidental exercise is a great tool that people can use to help improve their health and reach their goals. Incidental exercise is when you complete small amounts of exercise or physical activity that builds up throughout the day. This is very dependent on your daily tasks and is designed to help you build up your activity levels without devoting the suggested 30 minutes a day to exercise.

How can we incorporate it into our day?

Incorporating it into your daily routine can actually be very easy. What you want to do is find ways to add activity to your normal daily tasks. For example, if you drive to work, park your car and walk from there to the office, try parking the car further away and walking an extra 200m each way to work. You could try taking the stairs up to your office rather than the elevator. Even the use of a sit to stand desk rather than spending all day sitting will help increase your daily activity levels. As you can see these are not major bouts of activity, but you can imagine over the course of the day they build up.

How much should I do?

So now you know what incidental exercise is and how to incorporate it into your day, but how much should you do? This is a very tough question as it is very reliant on what your goals are, how much non-incidental exercise you do, and even what your daily routine is like. If your goal is to lose weight, then the more the better. If your daily routine involves a lot of walking as it is, you might want to try and incorporate more strength-based movements. As a rule of thumb If you aim for at least 30 minutes a day then you could well be on the way to reaching your goal.