Just do one thing to boost your health

For 23.5 hours each day you can sit, slouch, sleep, whatever…but whatever the whatever, make sure you walk for the remaining 0.5 hours in the day. It is the single best thing you can do for your mental and physical health. It is the “green prescription” the cash-free Rx we can all self-prescribe to improve quality of life. It does assume you can walk, of course, so one might say it’s for the 99%

It’s an interesting idea, but I am not entirely convinced that walking for half-an-hour a day is quite enough. When we got a dog, my visits to the gym dwindled from three hour-long sessions a week to zero, but I was walking briskly, with the dog for an hour every day by that time. However, I noticed over the last few months that my cardiovascular fitness was not quite up to par, so back to the gym for me, three half-hour sessions there for just over a month (in addition to 6x and hour a week walking the dog) and I feel a whole lot better and have got back that “need” to go to the gym feeling again.

Certainly, the half an hour a day walking is going to be beneficial, but the human body also needs to roughly double its normal heart rate regularly to maintain CV. I also think you have to get as much face-to-face conversation and laughter for good mental health so don’t skimp on that, and maybe cut back on the sitting at a screen. An evening’s dancing can cover a lot of the latter. If you fancy a sing-song that does your lungs a world of good too, with little effort. Check out some of my own musical output on the Dave Bradley BandCamp page.