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Get On the Right Track and Walk to Work Today

It’s a key part of fitness!
Leanne Spencer

Leanne Spencer

3 Min Read

You know you need to start exercising but you just don’t have a clue where to start. It’s a really common situation to be in – what should I do? What’s going to be effective? What’s safe for me to do? I don’t have anything that I enjoy.

Here’s where you should start… Walking.

Walking is what we were designed to do. We’re bipedal human beings and are designed to do lots and lots of daily low-level exercise, which is essentially walking.

It’s Walk To Work Day on 5th April, so you’ve got a little bit of motivation and incentive to do that. You could jump on the train a stop later, jump off the train a stop earlier, ditch the car for the day and walk. Just try to be more active and hack your commute in some way so you can get some more steps in.

The reason I’m such a big fan of walking is I think it’s one of the most underappreciated elements of fitness. When we talk about fitness we tend to think about squats, lunges, athletic type of exercises – which a lot of people can’t relate to. Walking is a key part, even for me as a recreational athlete, of my fitness regime. It’s what underpins just about everything I do, so I will walk a lot every day.

I’ll do a little bit of moderately intensity exercise. It could be just a fast walk, it could be a light jog. Then I’ll do occasional bursts of high intensity activity. You might not be there just yet so start with walking. Aim to do around 5,000 steps if you don’t walk very much, 10,000 steps if you already do bits of walking – it’s really the foundation of fitness. 10,000 steps can be quite a lot to get done, particularly if you have a conventional office job or a desk job.

So get inspired with the Walk To Work Day. Lots of other people will hopefully be doing the same thing. Maybe that’s the point at which you can really motivate yourself to get started, but really for now focus on walking – different paces and different distances and different intensity of walking. It’s a key part of fitness!

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If you’re reading this, you might be in reasonably senior position, running your own business or have a busy life running the home and juggling other responsibilities. Either way, you’re busy!

The convergent pressures of work and family life have probably meant that the time you did have to spend on health and fitness has disappeared. Why not talk to us and see how we can help.

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Leanne Spencer is an entrepreneur, coach, TEDx Speaker, author of Remove the Guesswork, and founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. Bodyshot is a health and fitness consultancy that helps busy professionals get more energy by removing the guesswork around their health, fitness and nutrition. Visit www.bodyshotperformance.com or email [email protected] to register your interest in our services and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Author(s)

  • Leanne Spencer

    Leanne is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. She delivered a TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight', is the author of bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork' and 'Rise and Shine', and hosts a podcast called ’Remove the Guesswork‘. Leanne is the founder of Bodyshot Performance, an award-winning health and wellbeing company. Bodyshot Performance work with businesses of up to 500 people who want to create a culture of energy, vitality and performance through the business and position wellbeing as a competitive advantage. Bodyshot intersect the latest science and technology to provide unique solutions to the challenge of wellbeing in the workplace that have a direct impact on the bottom line. Our clients have won awards for wellbeing and recognise it directly improves employee engagement and retention and attracts talent into the business.  We also work with chronically stressed or burned out professionals to get you back in control of your health and able to do the things you want to do in life. My expertise is around health, fitness and wellbeing, specifically focusing on sleep, mental health, energy, body composition, digestion and fitness. I host a popular podcast on iTunes called ’Remove the Guesswork ‘, and in November 2016 I delivered a TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight'. I’m the author of the bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork' and 'Rise and Shine' and I regularly speak to corporates on health and wellbeing. My personal values are to live truthfully, considerately and to "suck all the marrow out of life" as Thoreau said. I support the charity Diversity Role Models which works to combat homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. I recently completed the world’s toughest ski race to raise £10,125 for Alzheimer's Research as my father-in-law was profoundly ill with Alzheimers, and I am on a constant mission to find ways to live in a way that is sustainable and environmentally friendly. I love sport, fitness, reading, gardening, business, podcasting, and being with my cat and our scampish little rescue dog, Kami from Romania.