A couple of weeks back, one of my counselling colleagues challenged me to complete a ‘Daily Movement Challenge’.

This was in response to us both feeling a little lethargic and inactive from being on home lockdown for an extended period.

The idea of a Daily Movement Challenge is to get oneself back in the habit of moving the body on a daily basis. It isn’t so much a fitness challenge, as a challenge to re-awaken one’s playfulness and willingness to look after oneself.

The challenge itself is relatively simple. Those who already workout will find it easy. Those who haven’t worked out in a while might find it a little more challenging [if you have medical or other conditions in which you need to be careful re: exercise, please speak to your health professional before commencing this]

This is how it works:

Each weekday there is an exercise: squats, situps, lunges, pushups and mountain climbers.

Your goal is to find a moment to complete one of the exercises, each day. Then tick it off on your score sheet.

Over an 8-week period, the number of repetitions increases. Very quickly you have a visual representation of your return to movement.

It is by no means a full workout, but it encourages you to take little moments in the day to get your body moving. I just did my 32 situps for the day before writing this post.

I’m 2 weeks into the challenge and really enjoying it. It feels good to have this little achievement baked into the day. I know that it will be a good foundation to set up other good habits. I love boasting about it and letting the colleague who challenged me to it know that I am keeping up.

So I thought I’d invite students to have a crack.

Take the attached file, print it out and put it somewhere you’ll see it (e.g. fridge). Commit to seeing out the full 8 weeks, then you can revisit your physical activity goals.

Now this kind of activity is more fun when you do it with others, so I have set up a forum on Oasis Online where you can register your participation and record your success.