10 hilarious ways to increasing your incidental exercise

10 hilarious ways to increasing your incidental exercise

We all know the importance of incidental exercise. It’s the exercise you manage to do without actually setting out to do exercise and is widely reputed to be ‘very good for you’.

Well, your number 1 fitness blogger* is here to help you with a foolproof plan for increasing your incidental exercise without having to purchase one of those really expensive apps featuring annoying women doing yoga even though you and them both know that incidental downward dogging only occurs when you are drunk.

  1. Put your car in for a service and ensure the mechanic you have chosen is so laughably incompetent that they manage to blow your engine up thus ensuring the car will never, ever go again.
  2. Ensure that the insurance process is so excruciating that even when months later when the process finally limps to a close, you are so traumatised you have sworn never to purchase another car ever again just to have to avoid potentially speaking to mechanics or people that work in insurance** ever again.
  3. Make sure you have shoes to wear that are easy to walk in but aren’t sneakers. You’re not Seinfeld. You’re not a German tourist with a bumbag***. You’re a person incidentally going from A to B via self-propulsion.
  4. Ditch the handbag in favour of a backpack or cross body satchel so you don’t end up looking like the letter S.
  5. Deciding to buy a ‘walking shopper’ makes you look cool, not 100 years old.
  6. Practise at home balancing 2-4 school bags, a bag of groceries, stray hats and artwork that can’t be crumpled in anyway about your body so that you can still hold hands and have discussions about why you are late to pick them up from after-school care.
  7. Book your client meetings in a geographically sensible fashion so you can catch a bus to the first one and then walk about the city in a timely and sensible fashion in your comfortable shoes that aren’t sneakers without needing to resort to loading your incidental exercise with short intense sprints that would impress Usain Bolt.
  8. Be sure to use an app of some kind that tracks your incidental exercise. Exercise does not count if there is no evidence for you to use in smug AF status updates or casually chatting with friends/complete strangers at the bus stop. Walking 60 plus kilometres in a week is not the kind of news you keep to yourself. There would be no point in doing it otherwise.
  9. Wear sunscreen.
  10. Be open to abandoning your new incidental exercise evangelising if a car company decides to sponsor you by giving you a car to drive so you can evangelise about it instead. Even if it is a Subaru**** and you don’t live in Canberra.

* citation needed

** except Kendy because she’s your friend and you love her

*** unless you are

**** Hi Car Company PR – my phone number is……

Written By

Alison Hallworth is the Director of Positively Social, blogger-in-chief at Talking Frankly and is actively opposed to apathy. She is passionate about the power of positive social interactions and their impact on individuals, businesses and human rights. She has over 20 years of experience in marketing, communications, branding, and social media, and ‘apparently’ talks too much. She is an admirer of wordsmiths, quirky thinking, equality, chutzpah and kindness.

1 Comment

  • I’m definitely taking a few of these ideas on board. Investing in some better everyday walking shoes is something I need to do, as much as I love my Saltwater sandals, they don’t encourage extra walking. And it’s time to dust off my rusty fitbit as well, I’m sure I’ll be a little underwhelmed by the little incidental exercise I’m getting at the moment.

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