The point of Fit2Thrive is to make you fit enough to chase what makes you happy. It’s also about the reverse. Chasing what you love and finding the activity in it. Let the activity itself make you strong.

Chores have value

You may not love shopping but you might love good food or entertaining others. You do what you can on the web to save time but going out to the shops, walking around and browsing also makes you healthy. So all you have to do is make it fun, even realising that chores like this are good for you and get you where you want to be can motivate you to do them. The point is you’re not adding chores to your life. You’re just using what’s there to maximise your health and your fun.

Find activity in things you love

Even better is when you start to find the activity and movement in the stuff you love. I love tennis. Obviously to play it is being active but watching it can be too. I happily sat in the wimbledon queue waiting for the chance to watch some tennis. It’s more effort than it sounds. I had to

• get to London
• then get across to Wimbledon. That’s a ton of walking to and from stations.
• Then from Wimbledon station to the ground,
• then all the way to the back of the queue. It’s a suprisingly long way before you even start actually queueing.
• Queue to get in
• Then once you get in the grounds the walking doesn’t really stop.

So, most of the time you are either walking or standing. That’s a lot of effort but I’d do it again because it is part of something I love. So I play tennis so I can enjoy more days like these. The rigours of playing prepare me well for the rigours of watching and other trips. In fact I never miss a day of work because I’m lucky enough to be able to play Tennis at work. It doesn’t matter if it’s Snow, sleet or whatever I still like to play. I’m not the only one.

The point is about what you enjoy this much. is it dancing, cooking, gardening, acting, singing. We all have our passions and all passions have activity and movement.

Get fit from days out

It’s the same story for loads of common life events and like visiting theme parks, Gigs, sports events. The great thing is that when you think about it this way you realise that much of the live fun stuff involves a lot of movement. Of course that sounds tiring but it’s also generally the most fun you will have for a while. So my best form of weight loss and health motivation is to book a cool event to go to, for me its tennis, for others and football match or maybe the Good food show. Then get in training for all the moving, carrying and general activity you’re going to do.

A while back we enjoyed a day out in bath and had such a wonderful time exploring that lovely city we did not notice the amount of walking we had done and the steps we had climbed. We were just aware of how much fun we were having. Though we easily walked over 10,000 steps, climbed the equivalent of over 25 floors among many other fitness goals.

You see, you might not consider yourself or your life very active and you might consider most of your fun to be sedentary. Given the list I just gave do you still feel that is true? Or atleast are these ideas of fun that you actually look forward to and would like to do more of?

I’m just pointing out that fitter people find these things easier than those who aren’t fit and that getting fit just means doing these things or things like them. You don’t have to run around to get fitness benefits. You will miss out on the benefits for running and intense exercise but if you stick with the lower intensity activities for long enough and do them regularly then your fitness will improve to the point that you find the intense activities easier.

So remember that

• Shopping,
• playing with your kids,
• taking the dog for a walk.

These are things we can all do that can help towards a big or a small day of fun.

Holidays

Talking about things we love means we must include holidays and yes it is even possible to have an awesome holiday and work on your health and fitness at the same time.

We recently had an epic holiday in Cornwall which we are still enjoying the memories from and another a few ago in Weymouth during 2015 that had so many sights and experiences it was the highlight of the year.

If you think about it holidays are really just a series of days out and so if days out can be good for us then holidays can be great. What makes the difference is how you approach the periods because as healthy lifestyle is more about the habits we have and how they affect us on a day to day basis.

In my explanation of each holiday I explain the habits we have come to adopt to turn these holidays into opportunities to grow from fun and enjoyment. I explain what we do through the year to develop the right habits with our holiday as the goal that we are building towards.

Live entertainment

I will leave you with another example. My wife, who is not the fitness fanatic that I am, loves singing and music in general. She recently saw her favourite band Muse live and absolutely loved it. She gets tingles each time she remembers the experience.

The one regret she has is staying seated the whole time. She just wanted to get up and dance, or even just stand. She has never wanted to do that in her life but this time she just felt it would make the whole thing even better. Even for the 3 hours of the gig.

That really surprised me. I know it can really make a difference it just wasn’t something I would expect her to say. So next time she sees them live she wants to be able to stand. All she needs to do is stand more throughout the day and it’ll be a breeze. It’s that simple but our lives and jobs get in the way.

Thanks for stopping by

I hope this article gave you some ideas about how you can get fit and healthy doing the things you love. The next step is to add this to your own life.

So I challenge you to think how you can add that little bit more standing, walking and moving into your days so that you can get more out of your time off and essentially smile more.

What do you do to be that bit more active?

• Walk a different way to work,
• park a little further away
• or take a trip and just see where that takes you.

Let me know in the comments below as I would love to here what you end up doing and how it helped you live a healthier life.