All you’ve got to do is not exercise for twenty-three and a half hours a day: the long tail of everyday life

I saw this excellent video on Martin Weller’s blog and was so impressed I thought I’d share it here. The message is, in short, that exercise gets the ‘biggest bang for your buck’ in terms of any lifestyle change you can make. You needn’t hatch plans for that triathlon, either: it focusses on walking in the main.

That’s 30 minutes a day to reduce a number of risks of ill health. The implied message here is that relatively small changes make a big difference. In a way, it’s like Chris Anderson’s idea of the ‘long tail’: we don’t need to embark upon an enormous feat of fitness like climbing a mountain or running a marathon. Instead, we can achieve success through an accumulation of smaller successes.

So, why stop at exercise? Learn a language, write that novel – ok, perhaps ‘read that novel’ is more likely if you’re time-poor. But the point is that the changes needn’t be the kinds of major ones we chase when the New Year begins and we jot our hopeful resolutions in our new diaries. And, if you like photography, you could always try Blipfoto.