Unexpectedly Great Workouts from Everyday Life

Visiting the gym, pool, track, or other arena for your particular fitness activity is a purposeful and necessary occurrence. Without a routine and set of goals, it is difficult to be highly successful in your endeavor.

However, our everyday life is filled with unexpectedly great workouts that can help us stay healthy, help other people, and have fun at the same time. By injecting more spontaneity, fun, and excitement, it is possible to accelerate health goals and become stronger mentally and physically.

Dancing at clubs / bars

Next time you visit your favorite club or bar with friends on the weekend, consider an alternative to consuming high quantities of alcohol. Instead of depressing your immune system, brain, and body, focus on creating a fun cardio session of dancing that includes randomized movement and play.

Dancing is a great exercise because, if done properly, can help improve your mental state and your physical capabilities. From a physiological perspective, you can easily see benefits from dancing in random motions that strengthen hips, back, and all parts of your legs. More importantly, as Elliott Hulse says, “if you cannot dance, you are not free.” Take the opportunity to free your mind from self-consciousness, from limiting beliefs, and overcome your fears.

Electronic dance music (EDM) concerts

Electronic dance music has been popular in Europe and other parts of the world for decades, but in America it is relatively new in the mainstream. Artists like Skrillex and Calvin Harris have brought EDM into the mainstream, which means there are always concerts you can visit.

Usually the concerts consist of 3 – 5 artists playing extremely high-energy and loud music that is immensely fun to dance to. Similar to dancing at clubs and bars, you can move your body in randomized ways for a unique workout; in some cases an EDM concert is the next level up because you can dance for 4 hours straight rather than taking breaks while with your friends downtown!

Jumping rope

Sometimes the activities we do as a kid are more emblematic of our heart's true desire. While you may visit the gym or run local streets, your inner child probably wants to jump rope. The entire premise of Dan Witmer's wildly successful Bass-Jump is using short, intense, and fun jump rope circuits in order to burn fat and maintain a healthier body composition. The reason he has so much success with himself and his clients is because jumping rope is a fun system that is easy to sustain in the long term.

Moving furniture

For strength athletes or bodybuilders, offering to help people move furniture is a great workout that tests form in the face of oddly shaped pieces. It also will strain certain parts of your body due to the bizarre weight distribution, which will help you to become a stronger and more resilient person.

It also has the obvious side effect of making another human feel better and more loved. By offering your assistance to another as a strong gym-goer, you are taking the skills and virtues from the weight room and gifting them to other people. This is often the most fulfilling thing that you can do and the added physical workout makes it even better!

Walking in nature

While high intensity training is great for fat loss and burning calories, your body burns more fat during low intensity exercise rather than high intensity. Walking is actually one of the activities with the most fat burning possible and it is a healthy, sustainable option for many who are too injured to partake in more intense activities.

By walking in nature you can better enjoy the world around you and appreciate it more. It is also a scientifically-proven way of burning fat and getting a complimentary workout to your typical fare.

Group activities

Getting together in a group of like-minded individuals for fun without intense structure can be the most rewarding workout that you can find. While this is more planned as a workout than the other examples, it is a fun way of incorporating exercise into your life. My friends Brandon Epstein, from Entrepreneur Fitness, and Dan Witmer, from Bass-Jump, have started a program entitled “Two Dudes and a Roof” to jump-start the week with guided meditations, physical fitness and fun.

See how happy we all look? 

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Why it is Better to Trust Your Body Rather Than Mind

Today's human has a double-edged sword with our capacity to think. Some of the deepest, most profound people become victims to the mental chatter of our “thinking” brain. Rather than feel the intuition of our bodies, we resort to logical conclusions, actions, and processes.

Getting in touch with our body and learning to trust it over our thinking brain can have unimaginable benefit for our every day life. More importantly, it can help guide us to our higher purpose (which may change constantly) and can answer many of our hardest questions.

How Does it Feel to Be Stupid?

How does it feel to be stupid? There is no feeling at all; it is a mental construct that one human passes to another, which is often debilitating in the wrong mind. When one identifies with being stupid or unintelligent because of what someone has verbally stated, it can create negative manifestations without any reality in the body.

This is an example of how our thinking brain can work against us. When answers seem so simple from our “gut instinct” or “intuition”, we decide to over-analyze and think about them instead. Terms like “gut instinct” indicate we should listen to our body more, but somehow we have lost sight of this.

Our capacity to think deeply has brought us many technological gifts, but it rarely brings us fulfillment and contentedness. We should all continue to philosophize, but balancing more of our hard decisions with an intuitive body can make a big difference.

Practices to Trust Your Body More

For those (often myself included) who get caught up thinking too much, there are ways to go back into our body to trust and embrace our wisdom.

Dancing

This is a big one. Elliott Hulse said once “If you cannot dance, you are not free.” Without formal training, it is easy to get stuck in my head thinking about how I look rather than just trusting my body. I derive so much pleasure from the flow-state of dancing and because it allows me to break the habit of rigidity in my body. If you have ever told yourself you need alcohol in order to dance, this is a lack of trust in your body.

Go onto the dance floor and move your body around without thinking. Trust every leg movement, step, hand flail, and head bob; rock your hips, shake your butt, and just let go. Don't worry about controlling how you look.

Weight lifting

One of the reasons myself and millions of other people love weight lifting so much is because it makes it possible to stop thinking so much and just do something with real sensations. Heavy weights hurt; there is pain involved and the inner masochist in all of us can enjoy the (muscular) pain of weight lifting to an extent. Pain is a heightened sensation even if we often identify it as being a negative one.

However, it is easy to get into the mindset of “mind over matter,” but this shows the lack of trust in your body. Of course, your body will try to stop you from doing something it deems unsafe, but the more you are in-tune with your body the more it will allow you to recognize the injury vs. protection response.

Don't judge feelings

Sometimes an event or situation will cause you to a certain way; anger, sadness, despair. Instead of trying to suppress or overcome / reason through the emotions, go for a walk and let them express themselves. Philosophical thinkers might take an affront to the ego and realize “this bad feeling is only my ego so I should not feel a particular way.” This is an over-analysis – you should feel however you feel!

Instead of thinking about the truth, go for a walk and let your expressions emanate from your body. When I am angry I will go on a walk listening to high-energy music, which helps get it out. I flex my muscles and sometimes even bark or jump around. This helps to release tension in the body and the byproduct is always that I come to philosophical reason afterwards. The only difference in going from body – brain rather than brain – body is that the realization sticks rather than fading a way.

Meditation

By turning off your thinking brain and going into your body / breath, you can practice balancing yourself. I undertook an intensive 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat, which pitted me in the woods for 12 hours a day doing meditation with few meals and complete silence. During this time I realized how reliant I am on my thinking brain constantly churning and talking. You don't need this type of intensive experience to benefit from meditation; 20 minutes a day to focus on your breath goes a long way. Start with 5 if you have no experience.

Psychedelics

Either Alan Watts or another great philosophical thinker said “You don't need to burn down the barn every time you wish to cook a chicken.” While meditation can offer great mental clarity and even hallucinogenic states, there is no reason you can't use psychedelics to enhance your understanding of the world around you and your body.

Some psychedelics, such as psilocybin, are very useful for present-ness and increased sensations. If you are able to take this with a group of safe, likeminded individuals in a natural / safe setting, this would be ideal. You may find heightened sensations that allow you to better experience the wisdom of your body.

Foam rolling

Much like weightlifting, foam rolling can be painful in a good or bad way. It definitely hurts, but it releases tension built up in the muscles and afterward feels great. By foam rolling consistently, you will notice the self-chatter slowly dissipates and goes away. Suddenly the excruciating pain of your I.T. Bands overpower the guilt of what dessert you ate for lunch.

Go for a walk

Sometimes getting out of your head is as simple as getting into nature and going for a walk. Even living in an urban environment can create lots of great sensory input, but there is no reason to analyze all of it. Simply let it pass through the prism of your mind as your body enjoys the movement of a pleasant stroll. Like many of the other practices, walking often helps us to revert to listening to our body rather than constantly listening to our inner self-talk.

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