Movement Routines

MYWELLNESS ACTION

Describe patterns observed from your eating and drinking reflections and discoveries. What changes will you make around your food and drink choices next week, based on your reflections from this past week?

You can use this chart to track your eating and hydrating data over three to five days.

Time

What I ate or drank

Where I ate or drank

When I drank water Context (such as dinner with family)

Gupta’s S.H.A.R.P. advice.14 Be sure to also describe how you felt before, during, and after each meal, snack, and drink.

Movement Routines

In Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing, authors Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp state that scientific evidence points to all of the following incredible benefits of movement: enhanced learning, greater producFood Movement tivity, increased resilience to stress, improved mood, and slowed aging.15 Wow, right? Kelly McGonigal, author of The Joy of Movement, adds that movement also activates feelings of pleasure and helps stave off depression.16 These are all incredible benefits to our educator lives!

When we move our bodies, we increase our energy levels—an essential ingredient of an effective educator. We see the benefits of increased energy firsthand with students when we utilize active brain breaks as a way to increase attention and engagement, and this is also true for us as the adults. Every job position in our highly relationship-driven field demands a robust level of personal energy. Working in a school requires energy and often a lot of it. Energy begets energy, and so

PHYSIC A L PHYSIC A L

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consciously incorporating movement into our daily lives is an essential need for us.

Movement includes all the ways we can move our bodies. For movement routines, consider what, when, and how you move your body. This might include how many steps you take throughout the day or how long you are on your feet as you avoid long periods of sitting.

Many of us spend more than nine hours sitting each day.17 Following wise and healthy food choices and exercising thirty minutes a day are not enough to offset too many hours of sitting. So, make inactivity your enemy! Reducing the amount of time that we spend sitting down is more essential than brief but vigorous exercise.18

Physical movement includes both planned workouts as well as all the naturally occurring movement you engage in during your day. Remember, some is absolutely better than none, so don’t get discouraged. Maybe you like to play on a sports league, attend exercise class twice a week (in person or online), or rack up miles on your stationary bike or out on the hiking trail—all of which are fantastic.

If you feel like you can’t find time in your calendar for formalized workout sessions, remember that your daily steps and natural movements (bending, stretching, lunging, and standing) all count toward your overall physical wellness. Work to weave movement into your normal daily experiences as much as possible. The National Institute on Aging indicates that flexibility and balance are part of your physical health alongside activities of strength and endurance.19

As you are able, take more daily steps by parking farther away from the entrance to the grocery store, restaurant, school, or office. Embrace the stairs and avoid the escalators. Walk to talk with a colleague rather than send an email, or pace while you’re on the phone. Before you know it, those steps on your smartwatch, Fitbit, or pedometer will start to climb!

Paying attention to movement helps us feel energized because by becoming aware of how and when we’re moving, we’re likely to add more movement to our day. We should participate in physical movement brain breaks alongside our students and strive to build movement breaks into our planning and team times as well. If a specific activity or workout is important to you, take the time to enjoy that activity as part of your life without feeling guilty or selfish. Put these activities on your daily calendar like any other appointment so you won’t miss them because you’re too hurried with other obligations.