Sure, the little bit of walking you do and perhaps some running, both of which form part of your daily routine are in a sense natural forms of exercise, but your body needs more than that. In order to build up some fitness you need to challenge your body physically to grow, evolve and improve, hence the need to exercise.
If your mission is one which encompasses fitness, then exercise is naturally a very important part of the equation, but it only covers half of what’s required. The other half is your diet and as far as common fitness goals go, the diet is actually the most important part of the equation. So plan your diet accordingly in addition to the exercise.
Something like regularly taking part in a competitive sport makes for a fun way to keep in shape, so that’s something you should aim for. You’d essentially be killing two birds with one stone – having fun doing something you enjoy and keeping fit as well. That’s how to turn fitness into a lifestyle, otherwise hitting the gym can feel like a chore and when that happens it’s very easy to fall off your regime. So make fitness a lifestyle, not a chore.
Take inspiration from the movement of the earth around the sun – if you didn’t know, the earth doesn’t always take exactly 24 hours to spin on its axis and it doesn’t take exactly 365 days to orbit the sun. Instead, these times are AVERAGE times observed over longer periods and that should inspire you not to want to try and maintain perfect form by way of your exercise routines throughout. There will be days skipped and there will be periods over which you can make up for the skipped days. As long as it all balances out in the end, then it’s okay.
Just going to the gym and perhaps running as part of your exercise routine to stay in shape can get very boring, very fast, so try and work towards some kind of competition to keep you motivated to keep working on your fitness. You can occasionally do an OCR (Obstacle Course Race) for example, or join a local sports club that competes on a relatively competitive level.
If you’re not keeping some kind of record about your exercising exploits then you’re missing half a trick here. You need to record things like how much food you ate to fuel your workouts, how long you worked out, how frequently you hit the gym, intensity, etc. All of this is important to measure the effects of your resolution to get into shape.
Your accountability partner doesn’t necessarily have to be a fellow gym-rat who comes and picks you up to drag you to the next workout session at the gym. It can simply be someone you tell about your fitness goals so that they can ask you about your progress occasionally, prompting you to keep working at it.
Whatever your fitness goals are, you need to make sure to start off with the basics of being able to get the requisite exercise to achieve those goals wherever it is in the world you may find yourself. So you should be able to do a full workout without having to head to the gym, for example.
There is no time like the present to start, because every second that you put it off is a second too long and it makes it harder and harder to get into the kind of rhythm you’d want to maintain a good fitness regime.
This perhaps goes back to starting right away as well, because maintaining a certain level of fitness you’ve managed to build up is much easier than actually getting there, starting from scratch. Try playing a 90-minute game of football after you’ve not been doing any endurance training for a mere week, for example, and you’ll see just how difficult it is.