Exercising is great, but it’s a real chore sometimes if you think about it. Going through the motions, hitting the gym and repeating the same movements over and over again just to stay healthy.

If the only exercise was built into your daily routine right?

 

Or better still, if only being in shape was your job, like an athlete or a personal trainer.

 

Well, not so long ago in human history, exercise was a normal part of everybody’s lives. Our survival and daily function once necessitated a near-constant amount of physical exertion.

 

Whether it was hunting, gathering, building or migrating, most important tasks required manual labor to accomplish.

 

As humanity moved into the industrial age, mechanization, and automation, soon took over.

 

We now rely more on the machines we’ve made that the machines we are, which on paper, seems comfortable and convenient, but in practice, is slowly becoming humanity’s ticking time bomb. That is until we developed the concept of exercise.

How Deliberate Exercise Has Replaced Natural Activity

You may take the idea of exercising for granted, but skip several generations ago and the concept of deliberately straining your body physically to no immediate end such as completing a work task would seem bizarre.

That’s because once upon a time, before hyper industrialization, being physically in shape was largely taken for granted.

 

When the conveniences of industrialized civilization crept in, a decline in health and fitness came with it.

 

By identifying this, humans decided the best way to stay fit and healthy in a world that demanded less of our body, was to simulate the stress that daily activity once placed mechanically and metabolically on our bodies.

 

Thus functional exercise was born, and today, it is one of the largest industries.

 

But what if you want to take the authentic approach, and immerse yourself in a necessary activity that also challenges your physical fitness?

Doing a job or completing a task might remove the tedium of repetitive exercise movements while delivering the same effect.

 

That’s why in this article, we would like to introduce you to some daily manual labor tasks you could start doing for yourself which can double as quality exercise

3 Daily Activities You Can Do As Exercise.

Cycling And Walking

The most obvious daily activity that can double up as a form of exercise is how you transport yourself from place to place.

For over a century, the transport of human bodies over any reasonable distance has been carried out by machines.

 

In many cases, this is necessary, when time is not an available resource, or the distance is simply astronomical.

 

But for day to day errands, moving on foot or even with a bike can actually provide a decent amount of physical activity.

Gardening

Depending on the amount of space available and type of project, gardening can be a great workout.

 

All the digging, crouching, bending, walking and carrying needed to plant and maintain a garden can be quite the calorie burner.

Gardening is a great way to engage your body in many functional ways as you will often be quite low to the ground, forcing you to adapt to multiple plane movements you wouldn’t experience standing upright or sitting in a chair.

 

Gardening is also beneficial as a therapeutic stress relief, which is definitely good for your overall health.

 

If you live on or regularly have access to work on a farm, then this concept is amplified into a high-intensity training method.

 

Manual labor tasks on a farm are intense and can give you a serious gym level workout.

Playing

Just as necessary tasks and jobs have become mechanized, removing the need for manual involvement, so too have the ways we entertain ourselves.

Today, more people watch sport than are capable of casually playing it.

 

We entertain ourselves more passively than actively through event spectatorship, watching TV and movies and playing video games.

 

Try to dedicate your free time to a fun and immersive physical activity. A sport you enjoy, a form of dance or even a martial art.

 

Hiking, surfing, and kayaking are other forms of leisure that allow you to engage your body while enjoying some form of entertainment.

 

Remember, playing can also be training

Conclusion

Exercise doesn’t have to be boring, in fact, exercise doesn’t have to be exercise, it can easily be a part of your life if you forgo just a few of the unnecessary conveniences our modern lives afford us.

 

Work hard and play hard.