Work smarter about your daily routine, here is an idea...

Self Report of regular life style physical activity vs. organized exercise.  Do you really need a gym to have health benefits of movement?.....Here is something I do to be active  as a household chore, but turn into a fun fitness idea with adding that mental aspect of awareness. 

Component of Health Related Fitness Impacted:
                    Muscular Strength & Cardio-Respiratory Endurance
Task:  Shoveling Snow

Equipment :  Coat, gloves, boots, hat, & shovel   VS.     Various styles of Fit apparatus

Results of Shoveling:    Walked 1.5 miles in 30 min. of physical activity
        Took:  2418 steps of which 1264 were in my aerobic zone for 14 min
            Calories:  230 used & I definitely was in my Target Heart Rate Zone

How did I record the above statistics?  A pedometer, which is a step counter, but I have a super fancy one that has software, gives reports & I had to program my stride length, age, height & weight for the feedback of the above results.  Plus, this pedometer is specifically a walking and/or running pedometer made for movement is straight lines that is constant verses playing a game of basketball or tennis where constant direction changing is taking place.  Mine is super accurate, but all the steps & other stats mentioned above are off because I took more steps.  Reason being I wasn’t walking in a straight line consistently, my snow shoveling had a lot of stoping, shifting and other moving takes place when I shovel in a small space.  Basically, the pedometer is very accurate in a straight line, but sometimes does not record smaller movements.   So to me as a personal trainer to get the above stats is impressive, but to add that I know it was actually more beneficial because of outside variables such as lifting the snow, pushing shovel with upper body joints only, and actually feel my heart rate in my target zone for the entire duration of shoveling which was 30 minutes in length.

The take from it, well I always kept my feet moving & strategically moved snow in a pattern (like a repetition for when lifting weight).  The idea was get a physical workout with being aware of bending my knees & @ certain joint angel points to be just performing a push motion with one side of my upper body, then repeating with the other and my feet just slightly shifting..  When I paused to push the shovel with one side I definitely noticed my body alignment to have a flat back & then lifting heavy snow definitely needs to have balanced form.   The boost of energy required to impact to components of fitness definitely makes this a health enhancing activity that would keep my metabolism running high for a few hours after being done.