So you’d planned to get up early and haul yourself to the gym for an early morning class. But when that audacious alarm went off at 5.30am, you silenced it with disgust before nodding off again. It’s fine, you’ll go after work.
At the end of the day, clocking off time arrives and you sheepishly pick up your gym bag and make a beeline for home. It’s been a long day, you just don’t have it in you to do an hour’s session. Plus you’re hungry and you need to do some ironing, or phone your mum, or buy that very important thingy online.
The reality is that sometimes, the prospect of hard work at the gym bookending hard work at your desk, is just too much to bear. But whilst summoning up the motivation to sweat your way through 60 minutes of spin might be a step too far, you probably could commit to pulling on your trainers and pushing through 15 minutes of jogging, right?
"What’s the point in that?” you might ask, well here’s five pretty good reasons to start squeezing in a cheeky jog before dinner:
- Live five years longer - committing to 15 minutes of slow to medium paced jogging a day has been linked to an increased life expectancy of over five years.*
- You’ll strengthen your heart… - research has shown that people who undertake moderate exercise, like jogging, for just 75 minutes over the course of a week have significantly lower heart rates.**
- …And your bones - yep, jogging gives you awesome bones. A US study found that jogging just nine times in a month can increase bone density, decreasing the risk of breaks and osteoporosis.***
- Improve your lung capacity - when you jog, your lungs need to work harder to meet the oxygen demands of those moving limbs. Just like your heart, the harder they work, the more efficient your lungs become and the better they get at extracting oxygen from the air you breathe and feeding it to those hungry muscles.
- Lose a few pounds - there’s the obvious reason; 15 minutes of pavement pounding is clearly going to burn more calories than 15 minutes of Eastenders, but that’s not all. According to recent research, running might also reduce your appetite and prevent that post-dinner snacking. ***
So, rather than beating yourself up and promising you’ll do better tomorrow; have a quick outfit change and with just 15 minutes of jogging, you can still do brilliantly today!
*http://content.onlinejacc.org/article.aspx?articleID=2108914
** http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)60749-6/abstract
*** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446719/
**** http://www.the-aps.org/mm/hp/Audiences/Public-Press/Archive/08/40.html
