NEPA (NON Exercise Physical Activity)

courtesy of Joaaso

A Little while ago I wrote a post called Mama and Baby exercise about how you can exercise while you baby is in a carrier, which is pretty much the way I spent the first months with my babies…The gist of this thinking is that if you don’t have the possibility to take time to exercise - then work some into you everyday chores and tasks. (like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and cleaning the paw prints of the kitchen cupboards while squatting and  so on.

I never really gave it much thought, and it has become part of my way of doing things. Mama Sweat, who recently had a baby, and is rediscovering life with less control, and less free time, wrote a really great post about this, and to give it more justification she found that this kind of activity actually has a scientific name

taking the stairs and walking a little farther than you need to have a real name and a real acronym: Non Exercise Physical Activity or NEPA (but if you Google it the first thing that comes up is “National Environmental Protection Agency” so scroll down before you give up).

While you can’t use NEPA as an excuse not to work out, You can at least try and fit in some NEPA when working out is not an option for various reasons. I try walk to the day car to pick my kids up, and the 10 minutes it takes me to get home pushing a pram with a 2 year old and a four year old on it at a brisk pass, does constitute as some form of physical activity.

Also, one of the benefits of being forgetful, is that I have to run up and down the stairs about 10 times for every little thing, because I keep forgetting things downstairs, when my office is upstairs, and vice verse…

So, Even if I don’t get to workout everyday, I certainly do NEPA!