Squat While Brushing Your Teeth
Everyone says that to develop a good new habit, you need to start small. Pick one step-by-step way to easily master your New Business and slowly work your way up from there. This is sound advice and I never took it.
That is, until this year. Inspired by the Vitals pull-up challenge in January – and terrified of the idea of maneuvering through the crowd of New Year’s resolutions at the gym last month – I decided my training goals would be simple: I’ll do at least five pull-ups every day. -UPS. Ideally, over time, I would do more reps and improve my form (and maybe even add some abs work or something while I was already on the mat), but the point was to do something – that little every single day.
And it worked. Yes, I found that my upper body strength improved and my posture was straighter. But also – as promised in every blog post and magazine article since time immemorial – my daily commitment to doing something small inspired me to want to do more.
In particular, it gave me the idea to start doing squats while I brush my teeth in the morning. (Again, this is what fitness writers have been recommending ever since self-improvement tips came out. What can I say, we all get down to business at our own pace.) Personally, I find squats especially tedious. and unpleasant in and of itself, but doing them while I brush my teeth and listen to the radio is just as distracting as it takes to make the habit bearable.
More importantly, doing a small amount of reps every day has paid serious dividends. There are obvious aesthetic benefits, but perhaps more importantly, climbing the subway steps every day feels much easier and less like climbing. To be honest, I am both shocked and delighted at the level of improvement I have seen with such minimal daily effort. It was a necessary reminder that even a small amount of work to achieve a goal is exponentially more productive than the decision that if you cannot do something important, you can do nothing at all.
All this means: Consider doing a few squats while you brush your teeth: tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. Maybe even take part in the February push-up challenge while you’re doing it. Your body, exhausted by office work, will be grateful to you for this.