Life Hacks Fitness Exercise | 6 Weeks to a Happier You Quickstart Guide

Foreign Today's presentation of integrative behavioral health care. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Today we are continuing our six weeks to a Happier, Healthier you series. And we are talking about 25 life hacks for fitness. Why are we talking about fitness on something that's typically a mental health program? Why? Well, because exercise releases endorphins and serotonin. Remember, serotonin is your happy chemical and endorphins are your pleasure chemical. So that's a good thing. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to get to the point of getting that quote, runner's high. Any kind of exercise has been shown to contribute to positive changes in our gut microbiota as well as our hormone and neurotransmitter balance. Exercise helps joints stay lubricated and can ease pain and stiffness when done correctly. And when we get depressed, for example, a lot of times we don't have energy. We don't feel like we can even hardly get off the couch, let alone, oh my gosh, exercise. That's just even more than people can contemplate sometimes when they're depressed. And it's important to recognize, as you know, Newton said, I think it was Newton. A body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. When we don't move around, we will get stiffer. We will experience more pain and aches and those sorts of things. So it is important to try to move. Even if you're not getting up and walking around the block. It's important to get up and try to move around the house a little bit at least, or if you're sitting in place, you know, just try moving your joint. Try stretching. And I say when done correctly, when we exercise too hard or when we exercise incorrectly or do things that our body is really not able to do at this point in time, it can cause pain. When I, for example, get snarky and I decide to go to the gym and try to squat at my max weight, you know, I almost inevitably end up having back pain for two or three weeks. So, you know, I know that if I want to be healthy and relatively pain free, I can't push myself quite that hard, especially when it comes to comes to squats because my lower back just can't handle it. Exercise reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancers. They have found this repeatedly 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise throughout the week, preferably divided up into at least three sessions, reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease and cancers by sweating. We are detoxifying the body by exercising and increasing our heart rate. Even if you're not breathing heavily like some people think you need to be when you're exercising. Even if you're just moving your body, you're increasing your heart rate, you're increasing your breathing so you're increasing your oxygenation. Your think about if you've ever had to walk up two or three flights of stairs. You know your heart rate is up by the time you're finished doing that and you are consuming more oxygen. The more oxygen we have, the less you. If we're well oxygenated, we tend to feel like we've got more energy and we yawn less. Yawning is often our body's response to insufficient oxygenation. Unfortunately, a lot of times we attribute it to tiredness like needing to sleep. A lot of times it's lack of sufficient oxy oxygenation that is contributing to our sense of foggy headedness and tiredness. Not so much adenosine related sleep pressure exercise has been associated with improved mood just in general and it can reduce pain. When we, when we, we improve our mood. When we reduce our stress, we're likely reducing tension in our body which can help reduce pain. When we improve our mood we are also reduc releasing serotonin and we know that increases in serotonin are associated with increases in pain tolerance. Exercise can be an excellent source of distress tolerance. If you think back to the works of Marsha Linehan and she educates us about thing distress tolerance activities. These are things that we can do with our energy in the moment when we cannot affect a situation the way we want to. If we're having to wait for the outcome of test results or if we can't change something and we're experiencing distress. Distress tolerance activities are things we can do to help reduce reduce our adrenaline, reduce our cortisol so we can get into our wise mind and more logically be able to evaluate the options for how to improve the next moment. So how can exercise be a distress tolerance activity? Well, when you're exercising you it can well add on it can be an excellent form of mindfulness. When you're exercising you can focus either on your breathing or on what you're doing. If you're lifting you're going to focus on your form. If you are doing cardio you may be focusing on your music. I know when I exercise I get into a zone, I have my music on, I can't hear anything else and I am pretty much oblivious to what's going on around Me, because I am listening to the words, and I am very, if you want to call it, Zen, in the moment, I'm focusing on exactly what I'm doing at that point in time. I'm not thinking about work. I'm not thinking about the animals or the kids or whatever else might be stressful. At the moment, I am focusing there. That really enables your brain to take a break. And then when your heart rate goes down after you're finished exercising, your brain's clear a little bit, you're not in that adrenaline haze, you can revisit that issue that was causing you distress and say, okay, what are my options? And a lot of times when we're not in. When we're in a proactive instead of a reactive state, we're able to make better decisions. And exercise has been shown repeatedly in the research to improve self esteem. I hypothesize they. They haven't figured out exactly why, but I hypothesize that when we exercise, we are doing something that's good for ourself. And it only makes sense that if we're doing something good for ourself, we must think we're worth it. When we exercise, we're setting goals and we're achieving them. That makes us feel good when we're exercising. A lot of times we are setting goals to get better. We're trying to speed up how fast we can run a mile or increase our reps or do whatever we're trying to do, but we're setting successive goals and we're achieving them. So we see success, we feel empowered. And that is a great feeling. So let's talk about exercise. I remember when I was young, I used to try like crazy to get my mother to exercise, and she just couldn't wrap her head around it. She just couldn't get into it. She would try and it would last about a week, maybe two. And, you know, I'm not faulting her for that. She didn't have the motivation and she was kind of going about it all wrong. What we didn't know back in the, you know, 70s and 80s, we know a lot more about now. And let's talk about some of that. The first thing that we need to do, and we knew this back in the 70s and 80s, but we didn't have all the information literally at our fingertips. You can download a ton of different apps that give you specific exercises or exercise routines that are scaled for beginner, intermediate, advanced exercisers. If you want to do that, you can. I know a lot of People at my gym actually have their phone with them and they're following those apps at the gym. More power to them if that helps them, you know, it's not an expensive trainer. They're free apps. You can also go to bodybuilding.com and they have a lot of examples of different exercises that you can do and they have nice little videos that show you proper form. And I am going to talk a lot about form because poor form not only often burns less calories, but it makes you much more susceptible to injury and pain, which, when we're injured or in pain, we're not probably going to be as motivated to go to the gym, if we can go at all. So form is exceedingly important. It's also important to remember to always work the opposing muscle groups. Your muscle, your body is divided into front and back and left and right. So you've got your biceps and your triceps, you've got your hamstrings and your quadriceps. It's important to work both muscle groups. If you develop an imbalance, you're setting yourself up for. For injury. I used to work with athletes when I was in high school and college and I would see them working their quadriceps a lot and ignoring their hamstrings and then they would do some sort of explosive move with their quadriceps and they would end up tearing their hamstrings. So it's really important to balance it out, make sure that you have, well, everything balanced. You wouldn't drive a car around with your front tires at 40 psi and your back tires at 28 psi. You just wouldn't do it. Likewise, you wouldn't do the driver's side at 40 and the passenger side at 28. You wouldn't do it. So don't do that with your body either. Get a fitness tracker. And I am huge on buying generic. I am huge on buying from small companies, American made, all that kind of stuff. Stuff. However, there are some things that in my opinion right now, the smaller companies haven't really mastered as well as Garmin, Polar and Fitbit. And there is a reviewer. His URL is DC Rainmaker, I think dot com. He does fabulous, really detailed reviews of fitness trackers and you can go there and get a pretty good idea about how accurate these things are. An inaccurate fitness tracker isn't going to serve you very well. So a name brand is often worth it. There are a few more like Ticker and Wahoo that have come out. I'm not as familiar, but if you go to DC Rainmaker's blog. He usually updates those at least once a year so you can find out what works for you. When I work out because I do a lot of high intensity interval training, I actually wear a polar chest strap which is a lot more accurate than your wrist based heart rate monitors. But if you're watching this, you're probably not somebody who is, you know, a die hard gym rat like I am. And I use that term with endear. Endearment. You know, that's not a condescension in any way. I love the gym. I love being in there. Not everybody does. And that's totally okay for people who aren't doing super high intensity training or who are just getting started. You know, base the, the purchases you make on, you know, where you're at. Obviously you want to get something that's good like a Fitbit or a Polar, but you can get the intro level models if you're just starting out. You don't have to get the souped up extra it does 17,000 things model. You can also do it without a fitness tracker. You know, back in the olden days we didn't have fitness trackers and we just took our pulse. You can take your pulse at your carotid artery or on your wrist. The easiest way to do it, if you're not great with math like me, count your pulse for six seconds, then multiply by 10. You know, bada bing. You figure out what your pulse is at any point in time. One thing about pulse, I will tell you, this is another one of the things with form that I harp on a lot is you don't want to be working out really hard and then just stop in your tracks. It's like taking your heart and slamming it against a brick wall. You know, if you're running slow to a, slow to a walk and then get your heart rate down a little bit before you sit down. You know, obviously if you start not feeling well, you may to do something a little bit more aggressive. But you know, generally you want to cool down, you want to slow your heart rate down, not just have it, you know, bam, hit a wall to target. To figure out your target training zone, you can go online and there are a lot of calculators if you don't want to do the math yourself. I get it. The average person who doesn't work out a whole lot or who was just getting into it, they the basic training zone formula which is 220 minus your age will get you a rough estimate of, you know, what your target Training zone is 220 minus your age gives you your max heart rate. And then to find like 50% of your heart rate, you take whatever that number is, your, your base, your MA, your base max heart rate times 0.5 and that'll tell you 50% of your max heart rate. So mine, my base is based on my age is 170 and so my general 50% of my heart rate is 86 beats a minute. Now walking briskly to or semi briskly to the mailbox, I can get my heart rate up to 86 beats a minute walk. Why is that important? Well, because working at 40 to 50% of your max heart rate reduces cortisol levels. It actually reduces that stress chemical. It can help your body out. It help, it can actually help you relax after a stressful day. So it's good to pay attention. Not all exercise has to be, you know, sweat breaking, hyperventilating exercise. Exercising at 65 to 85% of your max heart rate for at least 150 minutes per week confers the health benefits that we talked about earlier. So you would take this base number 220 minus your age times 65 to get 65% of your max heart rate. And that would be the lower bounds of where you wanted to work out. You can find charts that show you this information. You can find calculators that tell you this information. But it's good to have an idea about where your heart rate is so you can figure out where you're, where you're exercising. There is a perceived exertion scale that you can use. We're not going to get into that right now, but just you can look that up. Perceived exertion scale for exercise. That is another way of guesstimating your heart rate. Now if you're in good shape, if you work out regularly, you may be much better served by using the Carvonen formula because it takes into account count your fitness level, it's 220 minus your age, minus your resting heart rate. So people who have a higher resting heart rate obviously are going to subtract more. So 50% of my max heart rate going by the carvonin formula is 110 beats a minute. That's a big difference between 110 and 86. Just note that. So if you are in better shape, you may want to look at the Carvonin formula. So how can we work exercise into our life? Whether you're a regular exerciser who just wants to get a little more movement because sitting is the New smoking, as they say, or you haven't exercised much at all, if at all, and you really do want to start moving. But it seems, oh my gosh, so overwhelming exercise during commercial breaks. And it doesn't mean you have to do squats or sit ups or something that seems like it's going to be arduous or uncomfortable. You know, just get up and walk around the house or stand beside behind your sofa and do leg kicks backwards or something. You know, just getting your body moving, getting those joints moving to get them lubricated will help you feel a little bit better. It's going to slightly increase your heart rate. It's going to slightly increase your oxygenation. You know, any movement's better than no movement. You can make a television exercise game. And this is you play off the old drinking games. So every time Homer Simpson, obviously, if you're watching the Simpsons, every time Homer Simpson says do, then you have to do sit ups or push ups or whatever it is that you think you're going to do. Now this really only works if you're doing it with somebody. You know, it's hard to do a game by yourself. So, you know, take that. If you're watching TV with your kids or with your partner, that can be something that you both do. You can get ellipticals or little pedal bikes that go under your desk. I got one for my birthday and it is amazing. Normally when I sit here, I bounce my legs. Like, you know, I don't know what they are. Like I'm having an earthquake going on under my legs. But when I, obviously when I'm not doing this, I have an elliptical under my desk and I don't use a lot of resistance, but it gives me something to do besides bounce my feet, you know, like a crazy person. You can do the same thing with that elliptical and put it in front of your sofa. So while you're watching TV or while you're reading a book, you've got your legs moving. You don't have to sit up, obviously you can get the stand up kind. Those take a lot more room. But anything to get those big muscles moving is going to help raise your heart rate a little bit and raise your oxygenation a little bit. If you can't stomach a long workout, the thought of working out for 30 minutes is just, yeah, it ain't going to happen. Work out in small bursts throughout the day. Start with five minutes. You know, five minutes every hour, five minutes every two hours. Set an alarm to remind you to do that. You can download a app that is designed to remind you to take your medication. And then instead of taking medication, obviously, when it prompts you, you're going to go work out. And you can do that at work. You know, whenever it goes off, get up, take. Go outside, take a walk around the building, or go into the stairwell and walk up and down the stairs for five minutes. Exercise with your kids or your dogs. Make it fun. You know, you can play tag, you can do balloon toss. My dogs love balloon toss. You can throw a ball, throw a frisbee, go walking, hiking, play hide and seek. Hide and seek's a little harder with the dogs. You can do yoga. It doesn't have to be something that is super cardiovascular. You can hula hoop, Connect games. And I'm sure there are other versions of things besides the connect. We have the connected our house, and we have five different connect video series or whatever you call them. And I will tell you when I do them the next day, I am sore because they involve a lot of jumping and kicking and dodging and weaving and all that kind of stuff that. And my body doesn't normally do that. And it's fun. It's even fun, in my opinion, to do by myself, you know, because I want to beat my own score. I'm that competitive. Connect games are really great during COVID when people aren't really wanting to go to the go to the gym. Because you can work out, you know, in your basement, clean to music. When you're cleaning, you're moving around, you're increasing oxygenation. That's great. When you turn on some energizing music, whatever that means for you. For me, it's hard rock. But for other, it can be anything you want to listen to. You tend to work out more to the intensity of the music. If you don't have any rhythm, you may not work out to the beat, but you work out more to the intensity. You may be more prone to dance like a crazy person while you're mopping. I know I do, but that can be helpful. So you're killing two birds with one stone. You're getting the house clean, and you're getting exercise. When you put things away in the lower cabinets, instead of holding onto the cabinet and bending down and try to shove it in there, bend down at the knees and stand up. Every time you do that, it's a squat. And using those big muscles again is going to increase your heart rate, increase oxygenation, strengthen those muscles, which are ultimately also going to be important for balance, you know, right now. But also as we as we age, link exercise to watching television or listening to an audiobook or a podcast like my other one, Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery. If you only allow yourself to watch your favorite show when you are at the gym, on the treadmill, or you only allow yourself to binge watch Netflix if you're sitting on the sofa and using your little elliptical machine, then you are going to connect those two and you're going to be more likely to do some movement, start an active hobby like rock climbing. There are a lot of indoor climbing places that you can go to. I don't know if they're open yet in your area, but they're there. Bird watching that is slower, but you're going to be walking through trails. You're going to be listening and looking for birds. You're going to be moving. Gardening. You can do really small plots of gardening or everything as big as you know you can possibly do it. There are a lot of different things you can do for gardening. Even if you live in an apartment, if you have a patio, you can do a little bit of gardening and just you'll be standing up, tending to those things, watering, you know, walking to get. Whoops. Walking to get water. It will make you move some. Anytime you spend gardening is time that you're not sitting on the couch. Explore your town. You know, here in Nashville, we have greenways all over the place. There are lots of sidewalks in Nashville. Now in my town, you know, we live kind of outside of Nashville. You know, not so much with the sidewalks, but I do know that I can go into Nashville. I can go explore places. Opryland Hotel has a beautiful arboretum that you can walk through. Pretty. It's connected to the hotel. You can walk through it pretty much every day of the year it's open. So find places in your town that are opening. Safe indoor walking also can often be found at your local indoor malls, if you have one. When I lived in Gainesville, Florida, our mall used to open really early in the morning. I think it was 6am Now. Obviously the stores weren't open. They still had all their little rolly metal things down. But you could window shop. And a lot of people would go there really early in the morning to exercise because it was indoors and it was safe. Start slowly. Whatever you do for exercise, start slowly. Don't get up and say, I'm going to start exercising today and I'm going to do an hour. You're going to likely regret it. If you start out that with that much of a change, that quickly start out slowly, maybe 15, 20 minutes. If the next morning when you get up, you feel good, great. You can add another minute each day or five minutes, whatever seems doable. If you are weightlifting or doing body weight exercises like squats, you maybe you do one more rep each day. So today you do 10, tomorrow you do 11. And your goal may be to work up to 30 or. A lot of people set the goal of a hundred. I get bored. I'm sorry. After about 40 reps, I'm just like, okay, is this ever going to end? So, you know, I know me, I know my attention will not sustain a hundred reps. Do whatever it is that works for you. Consider doing intervals and you can download a Tabata timer app that is set and it will tell you when to begin your work interval and when to begin your rest interval. And you can adjust those intervals so you're doing 30 second intervals with a minute of rest or two minute intervals with 30 seconds of rest. You can adjust it to whatever your fitness levels and your goals are for that day. I like those a lot because intervals make things seem less arduous. I can do just about anything for two minutes and then I get to take a break. By the time I've worked out for two minutes and then, you know, done something low intensity for a minute, that's three minutes. I only have to do that 10 times and I'm at 30 minutes. Well, you know, I can do that. That doesn't seem as overwhelming as having to, for example, jog for 30 minutes straight. Make an energizing playlist, whatever that means to you. If it is club music, if it is instrumental, if whatever gets you going, make that energizing playlist so you look forward to listening to it. When I ride my bike in the basement at home, obviously not at the gym, but when I ride my bike in the basement home, I sing my heart out. And the dogs, the kids, the entire house, and probably anyone within 50ft of our house can hear me. But, you know, whatever I am, like I said, I am in my zone and I enjoy the music that I listen to. Keep a packed gym bag ready to go. Keep it in the trunk of your car. Just like you. I learned very early on with my son to keep a packed diaper bag in the car at all times. I had my active diaper bag and then I had my backup. Keep a backup gym bag in your car all the time. So maybe you worked out in the morning and then you decide, hey, I got a little extra energy, I can get another workout in this Afternoon, or maybe you just didn't feel like doing it in the morning, but you know that backup gym bag is there if you find a friend who wants to go walking at a park after work or something. If you work out in the morning, consider sleeping in your workout clothes. Especially during the winter. I wake up and I'm all warm in my jammies and everything and the thought of changing clothes, I'm like, oh, it's cold, I don't want to get cold. So I really, you know, eventually I've got to get out of my jammies and get into my street clothes. But it takes a lot of prompting and cajoling and coffee to get me there. So if you work out and if you sleep in your workout clothes, you kind of roll out of bed, put your shoes on and get going. Now this doesn't work for everybody. Your significant other may be like, why are you sleeping in your gym clothes? You know? But if it works for you, great. It's a suggestion. Pay yourself every time you exercise. I am very money motivated. So if I know that I'm going to pay myself a dollar every time I exercise and then at the end of the month, you know, I'm going to treat myself to something and that's great, you know, you can do whatever it is that can increase some people's motivation. Keep an exercise, energy, mood, cravings log. I know that's a lot. When you exercise, you know, just write down what you did, how you felt when you did it, energy. Write down what your energy was like that day, what your mood was like that day, and what your cravings were like that day after you exercised. Or if you exercise in the evening, you know you're going to reflect the next morning. But what you want to do is look and see if there's a trend. I know for me, when I exercise and I exercise consistently, my cravings for junk food tend to go down. And one rationale for that might be that when I exercise, I am naturally increasing my serotonin. And a lot of the food cravings that I have are oriented towards guess what? Increasing serotonin. So it is possible that exercising can be associated with reductions and cravings, improvements in mood and improvements in energy. If you don't overdo it. And that is the big thing. Start low, go slow until you work up to a place that you feel comfortable. Get a battle bunny, even if it's virtual. Virtual. Have a friend that maybe you share. I will screenshot the heart rate tracking data from my polar monitor and I share it with my battle buddy and we keep each other motivated. I'm very competitive, so I, I do not want to send a screenshot that is less than my best, and, and that's just kind of me. But, you know, having a battle buddy can make it more likely that you're going to keep going even when you don't want to. Walking meetings, thinking. Think about some of those meetings you've had. And I hate meetings. I don't like sitting still. But a lot of times, unless you're going over something super complicated, a lot of times you can get together with your team and have a walking meeting, unless it's a huge team. But if it's just like two or three people, you can walk together, you can talk, you can hash out things. There are some benefits to that. People have been found to be less inhibited when they're not sitting there making direct eye contact with one another. So that frees up some creativity. When you're walking, you also are tending to sort of ground your energy, so there may may be less likely of somebody to start getting really, really upset and not articulate it right away. Walking meetings can be really helpful. You're also out in nature and as I've said in other classes, but just being in nature has been associated with improvements in mood. So consider a walking meeting. You know, think about how it might feel different if you, you know, took your small team out on a walk. If you can't, if you've got a big team, maybe 10 people that are in this meeting. We used to have those meetings where all the directors would get together. What, going outside if you can, and having a meeting at a set of picnic tables where people are in nature can also help reduce their cortisol levels, reduce their blood pressure, increase their oxygenation. Assuming that you're not like right in the middle of downtown somewhere and inhaling gas fumes. But it can be more pleasurable. And to get to the picnic table and to get back to the office, you're still having to do a little bit of walking. Take the stairs whenever possible, watch your form. And yes, that's all caps for a reason. Three exclamation points. I'm screaming that it'll help you burn more calories. It drives me bonkers when I see people at the gym who are resting all of their weight on the handlebars or they've got the treadmill at like 15 incline and they are holding on for dear life doing that. All they're doing is training their feet to move. They're not actually burning the calories that the machine says they're burning because they're not using their body weight as resistance. And it's also, you know, set. When you're leaning on the handlebars, you're putting a lot of stress on your lower back. You, you're putting stress on other joints. Not good for you. It can set you up for more injury and more pain in the long run. It's better to do a less intense exercise that you can maintain good form. You're going to use a whole lot more muscles if you're using your core for stability and you are going through the motions like you're supposed to if you don't know what proper form is for a machine. So Again, go to bodybuilding.com or look it up online or ask the trainer at your gym and they can tell you. Another one of my pet peeves is when people are on the elliptical and they are just bouncing like they're on a trampoline. All they're doing is riding the momentum, so they're not really getting the intensity of workout that they think they're getting. But those, those are my little peeves. At least they're there. And that is where, you know, I accept the good with the bad. I embrace the dialectics. I'm thrilled that they're there and doing something and not sitting on the, on the sofa. Use compound exercises whenever possible. It makes your workout go a lot faster. Compound exercises use multiple muscle groups, such as holding barbells and doing a squat. And then when you come up doing an overhead press, that can be one, one repetition and that just uses everything and it uses the time so much more efficiently. And know yourself, work out on zoom with a buddy if you know you will not work out alone. I. Unless I'm doing the Connect games, that's about the only time I know that I will work out at home by myself. I tried for the longest time during the 80s and 90s to do the videos and those sorts of things, and I'm just too much of an extrovert to do that. I get bored. I feel silly. You know, I don't have any motivation. I'm way too competitive. So when I go to the gym, you know, I have that. I draw that energy that extroverts do from being around people. And I have that competitive nature that, you know, I am not going to slack or get off the, you know, treadmill after five minutes because, you know, people are watching. Not saying that's, that's necessarily the healthiest attitude, but My ego does encourage me to exercise a little bit harder. So know yourself. If you know you're not going to be motivated to do workout videos from home, then figure out what you're going to be motivated to do. Any movement is better than no movement. Set a goal starting today to add one minute of exercise every day. So by the end of 30 days, guess what? You're going to be exercising 30 minutes a day. It is really that easy to work it in. Anybody else have any other exercise life hacks that might be helpful that you'd love to share with us? Now remember, for exercise to be helpful for your mental health, you don't have to work to that place where you're in 65% or greater of your target heart rate training zone. That is when you are breathing. So somewhat labored might be a little excessive, but you're breathing harder. And not everybody really likes that feeling. For mental health benefits, any movement, any oxygenation, anything that helps you keep your joints lubricated, reduce cortisol, reduce tension, all that's going to be helpful for health benefits. According to the American Heart association and the American Cancer association and I think the CDC, you do want to get 150 minutes of exercise at 65 to 85% of your max heart rate every week. But work up to that. You know, start by doing something and then, you know, maybe by we're, we're in January right now. Maybe by March or April you'll feel strong enough and energetic enough to start taking on something that intense. All right, everybody, thank you for being with me today. I really enjoy doing these and I will see you tomorrow at 9:30.