What is the difference between movement and exercise snacks?
And why you need to focus on the exercise part more if you are a remote worker.
Movement Snacks
The baseline of feeling good.
Movement snacks are supposed to engage your muscles and put fluid in your joints. They can be as short as a few seconds, even a short breathing practice could count. But especially full range of motion snacks like deep squats or arm rotations help you stay loose and limber during the day.
They are supposed to keep the stiffness out and your body well-aligned. In a perfect world, you would be warmed up and ready to start a workout at all times after doing a mobility routine in the morning and keeping everything ready by movement snacking.
That is hard to achieve while working on a screen but the effort is worth it.
Tools like work break reminders and moving meetings can make a big difference and once you get used to being “warmed up” it becomes second nature to keep snacking.
Examples of movement snacks:
Wrist mobility
Exercise Snacks
Exercise snacks are tiny workouts.
They are extremely powerful tools for improving cardio and getting you out of an energy slump. Every activity that elevates your heart rate counts (technically sauna is an exercise snack) and it can be as short as 30 seconds to have a positive effect.
The easiest way to implement this is to make daily activities a little bit harder on purpose. Take the stairs instead of the elevator and go a little too fast.
Carry your groceries all the way without taking breaks. Park further away or step off the bus one station early.
Try to elevate your heart rate at least 5 times a day for a good baseline.
Additionally, make one of these intense and long enough for you to start sweating as you would from a quick walk or a small workout.
Examples of exercise snacks:
Running up a few flights of stairs
Doing a max-set of Push Ups
1 minute of Sit Out Burpees
Put the snack bowl out!
I think I don’t have to say it, you have to do both.
When working remotely it is even easier to neglect the exercise part, since we don’t have to catch buses, walk somewhere for lunch, or have wrestling matches at the water cooler.
Regularly getting our heart rate up and keeping our muscles warm and loose gets us 80% to great health and work performance.
