How Active Are You, Honestly?

Your alarm goes off early before work.  You hop out of bed, put on your workout clothes you laid out the night before, lace up your sneaks and hit the gym.

Proud of yourself, right?  Making it to the gym puts you a step ahead of most people.  You make the healthy decision to wake up early and go to the gym 3-5 times a week- makes you pretty active, right?

Whether you aren’t seeing the results you think you’re working so hard for, or you think you are doing perfectly fine in your current routine,you need a reality check.  Everyone can use a reality check every once in a while and people are infamous for over estimating their activity level.  Think those trips to the gym make your activity level ‘moderately’ or even ‘very’ active?  Ask yourself a few questions:

Did you drive to the gym?  Drive to work afterward?  Maybe sit on the subway or the bus?  Sit at a desk all day?  Use the elevator everywhere? Drive home? Crash on the couch for hours watching TV before you lay in bed for hours of sleep before doing it all over again?

What’s the big deal?  Over estimating your activity level can effect how many calories you think you need in a day.  Not enough activity, plus too many calories, equals weight gain.  You have to be real with yourself.

Way back when, there were no gyms just for recreational exercise, because the only thing people did all day was move.  Farm, build, walk, lift, sweat, work, repeat.

Along came modern day conveniences and dense neighborhoods have taken over, we don’t move anymore.  Gyms were opened to the masses to make up for the lack of activity in our lives, but even an hour or two of crazy workouts can’t undo 8+ hours of sitting.

You have to move.  You ave to keep up on your workouts but don’t rely on them as your only source of activity.  Take every opportunity to work on your fitness and your body and health will thank you.

Kelly Turner is a Seattle area ACE Certified Personal Trainer, health and fitness writer and editor of the fitness website, PhysiqueSpeak.com. To contact Kelly with any questions, you can email her at kellycturner@hotmail.com.