Designing a Movement-Friendly Home: The Ultimate Guide to Boost Your Health
Our TV is inconveniently located in the room with the treadmill and wrestling mats instead of the couch.
We previously posted “35 Ways to Rewild Now,” where we talked about the ways people can rewild their life without an excess of time or money. Building on that post, I want to discuss how I set up my home environment to encourage movement. Our goal is to make the habits we want easy, and not something requiring a bunch of extra effort to complete.
Is Your Home Environment in Line With Your Goals?
This post is going to introduce you to concepts you can use to design a home environment that facilitates healthy exercise and movement habits.
Whether you work from home, are a stay-at-home parent, or don’t find yourself home much at all, you should consider how your home environment can be helping or hindering your health and wellness.
If you have a goal to sit less, but every room in your home is filled with couches, sofas, chairs, and clutter, you’re more likely to find yourself sitting.
If you want to exercise more, but your gym is 30 minutes away and you don’t have a space inside or outside your home to exercise, chances are when you get busy and run short on time, the easy choice will be to not exercise.
Why Should You Care About Moving More?
It’s common knowledge that exercise, and movement in general, are essential for a healthy mind and body. Physical inactivity underlies many chronic health conditions to include, cancer, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, and related dementias (1). The most expensive disease in America, coming in at a price tag of $327 billion annually, is type 2 diabetes, which is preventable and reversible through physical activity and good nutrition (2).
A 2015 article from JAMA Internal Medicine states, “There is no medication treatment that can influence as many organ systems in a positive manner as can physical activity (3).” Despite most cases of these diseases being preventable through lifestyle interventions; many doctors aren’t providing information on the benefits of physical activity to their patients. The most cited reason that physicians list for not including physical activity counseling in their practice is a lack of time (4). (Consider yourself counseled).
Even if physicians made time to counsel patients on the health benefits of physical activity, many patients also use “lack of time” as one of the main reasons they don’t engage in regular physical activity.
To gain back time, we need to make movement a part of our life and not an after thought.
If you’re starting from zero, the link below is a great flyer that gives you all kinds of examples of movement (they even count unloading the dishwasher). The bare minimum of movement for most people is 30-60 minutes, 3-5 times a week (5).
Sit less, move more. Exercise is medicine, flyer.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Look Around Your Home
Ask yourself the following questions:
Is your home set up to encourage you to be sedentary, or to move and get into different positions?
Are you placing an emphasis on outward appearances and stuff, or fostering a healthy environment?
Before I give you some examples of how I set up my home, I want you to understand the “why” is more important than the “how.” I’m not saying the way I set up my home is the way you should set up your home; I only hope to convey the thought process, so you can apply it to your unique situation and find a solution that works for you.
Some Examples
We ditched the coffee table a long time ago. There’s so much room for activities.
The living room - Not having a coffee table in front of our couch opens up the floor for all kinds of activities. While we do sit on the couch, we often move back and forth between the couch and the floor. We keep wooden pillows and bolsters nearby that feel amazing to work into sore muscles. There’s also something relaxing about smelling and feeling the natural wood.
Wooden pillows and bolsters we keep near the couch, ready to entice us to get up and move on the floor. Get yours here.
Spending some time on the floor is better than spending all your time sitting on the couch. Sitting on the floor forces you to continually use your leg muscles as you move through different positions. It can also work your core and back muscles, which can reduce lower back pain.
During a two-hour movie, we can move in and out of multiple positions, which helps with circulation. If we had a coffee table in front of the couch, we would miss out on all that extra movement.
Can’t you move the coffee table back and forth?
Yes, that's what we did in the beginning until we got tired of moving it. Inevitably, the table ends up staying put, and you forget that you should occasionally break up your long periods of sitting with some movement on the floor.
Also nearby, are a foam roller, exercise band, and trigger point ball. Find everything you need for mobility and recovery here.
Moving on…
The treadmill and wrestling mats get way more use than a formal dining room table would.
2. The Formal Dining Room - Unless you’re the affluent type, you probably don’t get much use out of your formal living or dining room. Why not turn it into something useful for you and your family’s health?
The home where I’m taking these pictures is temporary, so I didn’t go crazy setting it up, but there are no limits to what you can do. Imagine a rope coming down from the second floor or setting up climbing holds on the tall walls.
As much as we love getting outside, sometimes the weather or obligations prevent us from doing so. That's why we love having the treadmill. We use it for walking while listening to a podcast, for short runs, or to simulate hiking uphill. We also keep a weighted pack nearby.
The 10’ x 10’ wrestling mats are great for, well, wrestling, and we often use them for yoga. We prop up a tablet or phone and follow along with the Down Dog yoga App.
People also seem to gravitate to the mats; even though we have chairs in the house, people like to sit around on the mats, stretch out, and play with the dog. There are cultures all over the world that aren’t as advanced as ours, where sitting on the floor is still perfectly normal. Little do they know, the ones sitting on the floor are experiencing greater health than us with all our fancy furniture.
Minimalist standing desk setup with a naboso mind-body neurosensory mat specifically designed to stimulate the bottom of the feet.
3. The home office - If you spend any amount of time working behind a desk, a standing desk is an absolute must. I’ve heard sitting is the new smoking; I don’t know how accurate that is, but I don’t want to find out.
If we look back at human evolution, our bodies were built for movement. Standing while you work is a great way to keep circulation going, reduce back pain, improve posture, and boost mood and focus (6). Similar to sitting on the floor, standing helps with core strength and has the added bonus of improving leg muscles and balance.
At some point, you may get tired of standing and want to sit down, and that’s okay! The point is not to stand for 8 hours but to not sit for 8 hours. Having a stool nearby is great for going back and forth, and it’s also nice to put your foot up on. There is no magical prescription for sitting/standing intervals; do what feels right. You may notice the more you stand, the longer you can go before needing to sit.
When I was working on this post I switched between my standing desk and sitting outside in the grass. (Im planning on making a standing desk outside). If you have to work on a computer, do it outside, and see if you feel less drained at the end of the day.
4. The home gym—We saved the best for last. Everyone needs a space in their home that is “the gym.” That space could be as small as a spot in your living room where you have a yoga mat and a pair of dumbbells or an entire room or garage—in our case, a room and a garage.
You won’t see it featured in garage gyms of instagram, but it’s a temporary spot, and it gets the job done.
Even if you go to a gym near your home, it’s still nice to have your own space. On those nights you don’t feel like driving to the gym, you can exercise in the comfort of your own home. The point is to stack the deck in your favor. Give yourself multiple options for success.
Conclusion
While we didn’t go over all the rooms in my home, I hope I provided you with some ideas you can adapt to your home and circumstances. Perhaps this is less a post about how to set up your home to encourage movement and more a post about the type of mindset you should apply to your goals. My goal is to optimize my health and performance, so my environment reflects that goal.
A multi use rig I had in the backyard of one of my previous homes. Find it here.
Related Posts
Breaking the Cycle: Year-Round Self-Improvement Strategies
How to Make Fitness a Part of Your Life
References
(1) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1559827620912192
(3) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2212264
(4) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22524484/
(5) https://www.exerciseismedicine.org/
(6) https://www.ohow.com/2021/02/08/standing-desk-ergonomics-7-benefits-of-standing-at-work/