We often get so preoccupied with life and busy during the week, that many of us skip out on the gym. Due to this, a lot of us are missing the memo on the importance of having some sort of physical activity throughout your day to keep your body and your mind right.
Luckily, there are ways to get in some filler workouts. Someone like me, for example, has never actually had a real gym membership and usually opts to get in a small workout at home. If you get into the habit of fitting in a sneaky little regimen, you might be surprised at how that small change transforms your body over time.
If any of this is you, here are five ways that you could sneak in a supplementary workout on a daily basis.
1.A Quick Squat and Leg Workout Right Before You Shower
Make sure that you give yourself an extra 15 minutes to sneak in this workout before you run your shower in the morning or evening.
Using the edge of the bathtub as leverage, you can achieve some effective calisthenic exercises. Try to find balance by holding the wall or the towel rack, if close enough. I like to run my water just so it begins to get steamy.
- Start with one foot and placing it on the edge of the tub. Your leg should be folded at a 90-degree angle.
- Leading with the kneecap of your free leg, dip your knee to the floor as low as you can go, ideally reaching a 90-degree angle while keeping your back straight.
- You should be engaging your buttocks, obliques, and your core as you dip down.
- Raise your knee back up into the second step of this lunge exercise by straightening your leg that is elevated on the bathtub edge. In doing so, you give your quads and your hamstrings a great stretch.
- After doing 10 lunges, switch sides and repeat.
I like to do two sets on each side before I get in the shower every day. This gives my legs and my butt a nice workout. When I started this, I saw an obvious difference in only 7 days of a strict commitment to this workout.
*You can also do toe raises as you brush your teeth to work out your calves.
2. Take The Stairs
If you live in a building with an elevator, opt to take the stairs going up and down everyday for a few weeks at a time. When climbing up, don't be too shy to skip a step, and bend your knee into a mini squat. If you live in a home with a porch that has a few steps, or a staircase, don't be afraid to make the steps your own squat platform, while you go get the mail, or take out the trash. I lived in the PJs on the 10th floor for years and had gotten used to climbing up and down routinely, instead of taking the elevator that was constantly broken anyway.
3.Do Crunches, Sit-ups, and Leg Lifts Before Bed or In The Morning
I learned this trick years ago from watching my mother, and it has always stuck with me. Every other night before bed, while laying in bed, train yourself to do the following routine:
- Start with 10 sit-ups. Make sure you are lying flat on your bed. Keep your feet flat on the mattress, with your knees a foot apart. Go from lying down completely flat, to sitting up with your chest to your knees.
- Next, do 10 crunches, curling your head towards your abdomen, with your arms gently folded and fingers behind the nape of your neck.
- Now, stretch your arms, reaching for your ankles on both sides of your body to do crunches for your obliques 10 times, right to left.
- Finally, complete your bedtime abdomen workout with 10 leg raises. Enter an upward crunch position, and lift your legs 10 times. You can splash imaginary water for support.
4.Yoga While Chatting
I'm not much of a telephone talker, but if you are, take this time to do yoga and stretching exercises when you have your marathon telephone conversations with bae, family, or best friend. Get your mat out, and throw your phone on speaker to get in some extra work outs.
5. Get Your Twerkout On!
Incorporate some fitness into your dance sessions in the living room. So many of us love to parade around the house in our undies, dancing to whatever makes us feel good, lip synching in the mirror to our favorite girl power anthems. Why not make this divine feminine twerk session count?
If you don't have dancercise knowledge or skills, get on YouTube and search for some twerkout or Zumba routines. You can definitely get in some fitness moves, while grounding in some divine feminine energy.
RELATED
Ding. Ding. DING.
A life coach by the name of Thomas Leonard once said that “Clarity affords focus” and, believe you me, when it comes to dealing with other human beings, if you don’t get clear on where you stand when it comes to your interactions with them, you can very easily find yourself “focusing too much” on those who don’t deserve it and too little on those who absolutely do. And y’all, this lil’ PSA couldn’t be more relevant than when it comes to what I call “casual friendships.”
Let’s dig — and for some of us, dig our way out of — what it means to have a casual friend, so that you can get clear on if you really need those in your life…and if so…why?
Article continues after the video.
It Can’t Be Said Enough: Always Remember What “Casual” Means
GiphyThere’s a reason why I decided to share two videos by mental health coach Isaiah Frizzle at the top and bottom of this article. It’s because a lot of what he shares in both of them complements a piece that I wrote for the platform last year entitled, “This Is Just What Purposeful Relationships Look Like.”
It’s the author M. Scott Peck who once said, “Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it” and please believe that the older (and hopefully more mature) you get, the more you tend to see just how valuable — and fleeting — time is; and that is what plays a huge role in motivating you want to only involve yourself with people, places, things and ideas that will honor your time — and when something is casual? In my opinion, it’s highly debatable that it’s worth much of your months, days, hours, or even too many of your minutes.
The main reason why is addressed in an article that I wrote back in the day entitled, “We Should Really Rethink The Term 'Casual Sex.'” The gist? When it comes to relationships, “casual” is certainly not a favorite word of mine because I know what it means. Have mercy — why would you want to invest your time, energy, and emotions into something that is, by definition, apathetic, indifferent, careless, lacking emotional intimacy, and/or is without purpose?
I don’t know about y’all but that sounds like a complete and total crap shoot to me — especially if you are going to go so far as to consider this type of dynamic a true friendship (check out “Ever Wonder If A Friend Is Just...Not That Into You?,” “6 Signs You're About To Make A Huge Mistake In Making Them A Close Friend,” “5 Signs Of A Toxic Friendship That Is Secretly Poisoning Your Life,” “12 Friend Facts That Might Cause You To Rethink (Some Of) Your Own,” and “Less & Less Of Us Have Close Friends These Days. Why Is That?” ).
To me, when you decide to call someone “friend,” it means that they are loyal, reliable, consistent, trustworthy and willing to be there to support you to the very best of their ability — even if it’s inconvenient to do so sometimes (check out “Life Taught Me That True Friendships Are 'Inconvenient'”). How in the world can you expect that from something that has the word “casual” in it?
And you know what? That actually segues into my next point about casual friendships pretty darn well.
Ponder the Purpose “Casual Friends” Serve in Your Life
GiphyA couple of years ago, Verywell Mind published an article entitled, “How the 4 Types of Friendship Fit Into Your Life.” The four that it listed were acquaintances (which I actually don’t consider to be friends; check out “6 Differences Between A Close Acquaintance And An Actual Friend”), casual friends, close friends, and lifelong friends. After reading the piece, I think they consider casual friends to be the “pleasure” friends that I mentioned in the article, “According To Aristotle, We Need ‘Utility’, ‘Pleasure’ & ‘Good’ Friends.”
And although I certainly get that, I think my “cause for pause” is calling those people “friends” when they probably should be called something like an associate or possibly even a buddy instead. Why do I feel this way? Well, I’ve shared in other articles that I think social media has jacked up vocabulary words and their true meaning on a billion different levels.
Take “friend,” for example. Facebook had us out here calling everyone we connected to on their platform “friends” when some of them, we’ve never even spoken to before — and I personally think that influenced, affected and perhaps even infected our psyche to the point where we will call folks, both online and off, “friend” even when they haven’t earned it and/or who possibly don’t deserve it.
That said, do I think that we all could use lighthearted interactions that don’t go very deep and are filled with not much more than fun? Sure. However, if we were to move this over into a sexual thing — those types of people would probably be called a sneaky link, and there is nothing significant or substantial about ‘em. In fact, if anything pretty much automatically comes with an expiration date, sneaky links would have to be it.
And that’s kind of the point that I’m trying to make about a casual friend — so long as you know that the word “casual” is being used to describe them, while you may enjoy the people who fit that bill, they aren’t really anything that you can or even should fully rely on. Instead, take them for what they are and don’t really expect much more than that. Otherwise, you could be in for some profound levels of disappointment. And who wants that?
Final point.
How a Casual Friend Can Become a Huge Red Flag
GiphyI’m telling you, y’all gonna quit clowning Tubi. LOL. To me, the best way to describe it is it’s the Cricket of current streaming apps. What I mean by that is, back when Cricket (the cell phone service) first came out, people, like me, who used it service got incessantly clowned because it was seen as a bootleg provider. Now it’s owned by AT&T, and as someone who has rocked with them since I was in my 20s, I don’t have one regret for doing so. Cricket has always been good to me, chile.
And Tubi? Well, when you get a chance, check out CNBC’s article, “CEO at 33, Tubi’s Anjali Sud on success hacks she learned at Amazon, IAC on way to top of Fox streaming” — take note of the moves the streaming app is making and the quality of programming that is transpiring in real time.
Anyway, I find myself bringing up Tubi more and more in my content because it helps to amplify some of the points that I like to make. This time, it’s a movie that’s (currently) on there calledRight Man, Wrong Woman. If you haven’t seen it before, I don’t want to give too much of the film away. What I will say is that the main female character, she had a casual friend and then she had a close friend.
That casual friend—the one who liked to kick it all of the time—was a lot of fun; however, dealing with her came with a ton of semi-unforeseen consequences. Meanwhile, the close friend? She’s what the Aristotle article (that I mentioned earlier) would call the “good friend” because she tried her best to hold her friend accountable.
And really, it shouldn’t be a shock that the casual friend turned out to be a plum trip because if someone is loads of entertainment and pleasure and yet they are indifferent towards you, they make careless decisions around you and/or they don’t really make known the purpose for you being in their life other than to pass some time — where really do you and that person have to go past drinks after work or dinner on a rooftop restaurant from time to time? And if that is all that the two of you are doing, again, why are they deserving of the word “friend”?
Hmph and don’t get me started on the lack of reciprocity that typically transpires when it comes to dealing with people like this because, while they won’t mind you spending your coins on them, taking their calls in the middle of the night or listening to all of their issues — when it comes time for them to show up for you, they very well may gaslight you into thinking that you are being dramatic, clingy or “doing the most.” Why? Well, it’s mostly because the two of you never really established what the hell the both of you are to one another.
And so, while you’re somewhere taking them seriously, they are out here seeing you casually, and as much as it might hurt to hear, that doesn’t automatically or necessarily make them a bad person. You shouldn’t expect much where no clarity is involved. After all, casual is just that: CASUAL.
____
I’m hoping that you can now see why I entitled this piece in the way that I did. It’s because a red flag is pretty much a warning, and to me, a casual friend is about as big of an oxymoron (again, to me) as casual sex is. Friends and sex are both too intimate to be seen or treated casually. Oh, but if you step out and take that risk, you could find yourself getting far more involved than the other individual ever wanted to go, because casual is how things have always been. “Friend” was simply to get you more mentally and emotionally invested. SMDH.
American columnist Walter Winchell once said, “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” A wise person once said, “One good friendship will outlive forty average loves." Former President Ulysses S. Grant once said, “The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.” Does any of this sound casual to you? Yeah, me neither.
Again, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have people in your life who aren’t on deep levels. I’m just saying that you might want to consider putting them into another category than friend, because what friends do for people? There ain’t nothin’ even remotely casual about it, sis. Not even a lil’ bit.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Featured image by Shutterstock