What are your hours made of?

            Welcome to the last 2 weeks of the “Maintain, Don’t Gain Challenge” with the Health & Fitness Academy! We hope our weekly tips and tricks have helped guide you in your journey and we are looking forward to more interaction with you as we get “moving” in 2017! Today’s tip can be applied to our current challenge as well as our up and coming one that I will touch on at the end of this post today.

A simple phrase for maintaining and or losing weight is “move more and eat less”. Although this process isn’t quite that simple, movement and exercise can be. Moving more doesn’t just mean hitting the gym or the track. Make a conscious decision to get more steps in a day by taking the stairs or parking the car farther away from the entrance. Before sitting down to Christmas dinner, round up the family and take a walk or maybe even a snowshoeing trip.

            Now, if you are in need of some guidance when it comes to how many hours of activity a week you should be getting and how to break that up into the most important parts, check out the chart below from Precision Nutrition.

            I love that this chart gives time for “Active Recovery” which is SO important when balancing physical stressors in our lives. I also really enjoy the “Rest of the time” category because I have a lot of things I love to do the rest of the time. I do, however, realize resistance training and intervals are the foundations that allow me to have fun and play the “rest of the time”, so they are a MUST in my book!

            Now, what about this next challenge and how does this apply to exercise? Well, our next challenge is a movement challenge, “Move it to Lose it”. Sign up with your hospital department or HFA trainer by the end of the year with your name, email and $15 entry fee. Each week, you’ll set aside time to perform heart rate raising activities and track how many minutes you do that for. You will report your total number of minutes to your team captain every Friday. The HFA Team will track and average your team’s minutes. The team that averages the highest number of activity minutes through 8 challenge weeks wins the cash pot! Think of how high the pot can get with an entry fee of $15 per person! Talk about some external motivation! Minutes begin Friday January 6 and end Friday March 3!

            Now that the excitement for Quarter 1 Challenge is out of the bag, get started a little early by jump starting your exercise NOW because it will only help you finish strong in the “Maintain, Don’t Gain Challenge” and start you off on the right foot for “Move It to Lose it”!

Until next time,

Hayley Earley, BS, CSCS, Pn1

hearley@mvhospital.net