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The active lifestyle is something we all want; our friends, our loved ones, and ourselves. We all want to look our best, feel great, and have the confidence of good health on our side. But it turns out we know very little about the active lifestyle.

We applaud those who show up at the gym a few times a week for an hour each time. We have all kinds of new metrics to decide for us whether or not we are fit, strong, fast, or healthy.

But while these can be helpful, it’s the wrong way to look at activity. It’s never been harder to live an active lifestyle because now it involves some creativity. Let me explain:

My Sudden Realization

Graduating from college/university has hit me hard. Physically, that is.

Not to mention the injury I suffered to my foot which left me feeling helpless for the better part of a year. I was reduced to a very sedentary lifestyle.

As someone who had always identified as an athlete, this was jarring for me. I no longer had my stress outlet of running or playing soccer. 

Then, as I learned how to recover myself, I started blogging about it. I subsequently started doing a lot more research about things related to active lifestyles and picked up things like squatting, using less furniture, using a standing desk, playing soccer and running again. So I thought I was getting back to my old active self. 

Fast forward to this recently past Christmas in which I was gifted a Fitbit. Fitbits are widely known for tracking several key health metrics, namely, the amount of steps you take each day. The magic number that it wants you to hit by default is 10,000 steps per day.

This is a metric I never thought I would care about because I ignorantly thought that I was surely getting enough steps each day living my “active lifestyle”. 

What a wake up call this little device has been for me….

• On my average days that I don’t go to the gym or play soccer, I get around 4,000-5,000 steps for the whole day.
• On days where I am going to the gym, I can get about 8,000 in.
• On days I play soccer, I’ll easily clear 10,000, usually getting around 15,000.
• However, on a day that I’m sick, tired, or just not feeling it, I’ve been as low as 2,500-3,500 for the whole day!

Again, wake up call!

To clarify, hitting 10,000 steps in a day is just the average amount that a person is expected to get with a generally healthy lifestyle. This is by no means what an elite athlete is aiming for. We’re just talking about people like you and me!

This has already shown me in less than a month of using my Fitbit that I am mostly sedentary. It feels gross just writing that out because I thought so differently of myself.

Let this be a testament to how easy it is to get carried away, thinking we are doing just fine and making excuses for ourselves.

You may find that you are in a similar boat as I still am, assuming based on the past that you are doing what you should be even though you can no longer touch your toes, or your hip cramps when you lay a certain way now, or the two flights of stairs you have to walk up is suddenly a workout. 

Not only is my Fitbit crying out for more steps to count, but its also telling me how inconsistent I am. I have a couple days of the week that get 4,000 steps, a couple that get 7,000, and then one with 16,000 (from the night playing soccer). 

This is not what an active LIFESTYLE looks like. This is what someone who is pushing their body too hard to make up for the rest of the week (another thing I thought I never did) looks like. My days should look relatively uniform. 

I would much rather have all of those combined steps be dispersed more evenly throughout my week. Something that is closer to moving throughout the whole day, instead of working for a while and then going to the gym to do my isolated activity. 

How Everything Changes

But the reality is: the transition from student to adult is a drastic one.

When I was still in school, I went for jogs twice a week, played some intramural soccer, longboarded with friends at night, practiced taekwondo, dribbled a soccer ball around the field with music for hours on end, etc.

It was easy and felt natural to get activity in.

Now, as an “adult”, I’ve had to be a lot more creative and committed to getting some movement in. The reality is that you can sit in front of your computer working all day and night and people will tell you “Good job!”. That’s all you’re really expected to do as an adult/parent.

There should be more of an emphasis on moving your body and there should be more resources readily available for adults. 

Actually, I was just complaining to my girlfriend about the lack of athletic/sports-related options available for adults.

Once you get out of school, your options for physical activity seem to fall off a cliff. The options can be slim, our time is certainly slim, and it just feels like the tide is against us. You are fighting an uphill battle to keep yourself in good physical condition. 

I can even feel the loss of athleticism when I play a sport or do an activity now: my balance is worse, I’m not as fast or strong, and my overall coordination is just not what it was. Then there was the weight that I lost during my time being sedentary.

A year ago, I probably weighed around 145 lbs (I’m a thin guy). After my injury, I made a noticeable jump down to the 142 lb range. Recently, I’ve dipped as low as 138.5 lbs. This is the lightest I’ve been in years!

How could I be consistently losing weight when I’m already thin? It was all muscle that I lost! A lot of my shorts and pants don’t fit in the waist anymore and I’ve gone from a medium to a small in shirt sizes. 

Fighting the Sedentary Life

My response to this has been signing up our whole family at the YMCA. If you are not familiar, its a very big gym that has many options for activity beyond lifting weights and running on a treadmill.

Things like rock climbing, swimming, soccer, basketball, an indoor track, dance, martial arts, etc. It’s also geared for all age groups so my son (who is 4) and I alike can take advantage of different classes and sports to try out. 

I’ve also invested in online programs like Movement 20XX and Athlete 20XX so I can get a high quality workout in at home.

Even being less than halfway through the Movement 20XX course, I can feel my full body’s sense of mobility improving and my general strength increasing. It has parts of my body opening up that haven’t been worked in a long time and it feels great to feel more supple again.

I also desperately needed some strength work (as I’ve illustrated) and the unique bodyweight exercises taught in this course are perfect for me. I’ve never been one to lift weights or want to do strength training but the way it’s presented in this course makes it much more fun to work on. 

You can also check out the article I recently wrote about How to Get More Movement into Your Sedentary Life. I give tons of real-life examples of how you can make small adjustments to your routines to get more activity into your days.

From meal preparation to playing with your kids to using the floor more, you can easily start moving more and mobilizing your whole body today!

If you took anything from this article, it should be to keep yourself in check and avoid living in the past.

I’ve heard too many people talk about when they were an elite college swimmer, or a former college football player, or could’ve been a track olympian but they chose a different route.

Well, where are you NOW though? We were all great at something, but what are you doing NOW?

It seems to be a natural desire to dwell on your past achievements and it turns out I was falling into that category too. The key is to avoid this habit and focus on optimizing your current self, not re-hashing what the old you could do.