Many of us have had to make changes to the way we live our lives. Canadians and people around the world been challenged to find greater meaning and joy from our days spent at home.
The good news is that spending more time at home is an opportunity to look at our daily activities and make improvements, where necessary, for an overall healthier approach to life.
In fact, many people are embracing their time at home and discovering new ways to relax, spend time with close family and friends, unwind, and invest in their health and wellness. Read on to learn ways you, too, can make the most of your time at home and live a healthy lifestyle in the process.
1. Exercise In an All Season Pool
Swimming is great exercise, offering benefits to every system of your body. Some of the benefits of swimming include:
- Fosters cardiovascular fitness
- Helps maintain healthy weight
- Strengthens muscles
- Alleviates stress
- Tones your body
- Provides low-impact exercise
- Improves your mood
With an all season pool from Wellness Shop, you can swim year-round and enjoy the many benefits this relaxing activity provides. The adjustable currents delivered in an all-season pool create the perfect environment for practicing your swim strokes. Adjust the levels for an easy, relaxing swim or a more intense workout—the choice is yours!
2. Take Up Yoga for Relaxation
Another exercise many people enjoy to balance their mood and tone their body is yoga. Like swimming, yoga can improve your strength and help you get fit while reducing stress.
There are many resources online that introduce yoga to beginners, so if you’ve never tried this activity before, you can start there. Both swimming and yoga are great for improving physical and mental stamina, as well as doing healthy breathwork, which is why many swimmers add yoga to their repertoire.
3. Create A Healthy Lifestyle Morning Routine
Are you finding it difficult to get going in the mornings? Creating a morning routine that gets you up and going can help you jumpstart your day.
Your morning routine can be as simple as waking up at a set time, drinking a glass of water or your favorite fruit juice or antioxidant tea, and spending five to ten minutes exercising. Do a series of exercises like stretching, jumping jacks, sit-ups, and push-ups. For a longer workout that refreshes and energizes, add swimming and yoga, too.
4. Keep Hydrated with Clean, Fresh Water
Sometimes people forget to drink clean water throughout the day, and this omission can lead to feeling sluggish and experiencing headaches, among other problems.
Remember to keep hydrated from the moment you wake up until you go to bed by drinking enough water to keep your body and mind functioning at peak performance. According to the Mayo Clinic, the average healthy adult needs to drink 3.7 litres of fluids for men, and 2.7 litres of fluids for women every day.
While most of that volume should come from water, it is perfectly fine to obtain some of the fluids our bodies need from fruits and vegetables, fresh-squeezed juices, and herbal teas.
5. Plant a Vegetable or Flower Garden
Here’s an activity that not only gets you outside to enjoy the sunshine, but also helps you exercise and leaves you with tangible produce you can enjoy in the kitchen. Planting a vegetable garden yields delicious fruits and vegetables that taste so much better than you’ll find at the supermarket.
Planting a flower garden gives you beautiful colours to look at, and wonderful aromas to enjoy, whether you’re outside or you fill a vase with clippings to display indoors.
6. Upgrade Your Home with a Sauna
Who doesn’t enjoy a little home improvement project? Not only will you spend time moving your body and away from the couch, but you’ll also be making an investment in the appeal and function of your home.
Equipped with top-quality materials and an impressive design, an infrared sauna can boost the style and layout of your home in a number of jaw-dropping ways.
A sauna can easily be installed within your:
- Garage
- Bathroom
- Basement
- Spare room
- Exercise area
How will you upgrade your home with a sauna?
A Wellness Shop representative at your local showroom can help you select and install your own personal sauna in your home—get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to share more about benefits and sauna options with you.
7. Take Up Dancing
Perhaps you’ve always wanted to learn how to dance but felt too shy to take a class at a dance studio. Now that you’re spending more time indoors, you can take the opportunity to teach yourself basic and even more advanced dance steps in the privacy of your own home. Play your favourite vinyl and get up and dance!
8. Clean and Reorganize Your Home
Decluttering is great for your physical health and mental outlook. This is a perfect time to take a look at your home, including your closets, and get rid of things that no longer serve you. You can donate what is still in good condition and throw away the rest.
Once you have decluttered, you can work on reorganizing what you have left. Building shelves or adding storage solutions can help you become more organized within your own home. You can even try moving furniture around for a new look and better placement.
9. Rediscover The Joy of Reading
Reading is a relaxing, quiet activity that provides you with needed rest while expanding your mind. If it has been a while since you’ve read a good book, pick one from your shelves or your local library or bookstore, and dive in! By the way, magazines and comic books count, too. Whatever you once enjoyed reading, rediscover it now and lose yourself in blissful reading contentment.
10. Enjoy Regular Hot Tub Hydrotherapy
When you have your own hot tub at home, you can benefit from hot tub hydrotherapy. Jet-powered water can soothe your aching back, sore joints, and tense body. As you relax in your hot tub, you can enjoy a wide range of health benefits, too, including:
- Better circulation
- Diminished joint pain
- Less stress
- Better sleep patterns
- Relaxed muscles
- Hydrated skin
A good soak in a hot tub is easy and painless, and it will leave you feeling so much better afterwards.
11. Go Outside for Brisk or Leisurely Walks
Walking is an exercise that is accessible to most people. Even those with walkers and wheelchairs can join others, or go solo, on outings in the neighbourhood or at a nearby park for a boost in health, a change of scenery, and some great, fresh air.
12. Try New Healthy Recipes
Now that you’re spending more time in your own kitchen, why not try preparing some new recipes?
The Internet is full of healthy recipes to try. Perhaps you want to learn how to make plant-based meals that are out of this world. Or you want to take a traditional recipe from your grandma and make it healthier. There’s no time like the present to up your game in the kitchen.
13. Add a Room or Patio
Since you’re spending more time at home, why not remodel it for an updated look and maximum comfort? You can add another bedroom, upgrade a bathroom, finish the basement, add a sunroom, or create a patio or outdoor living space you and your family can really enjoy. You can do some things yourself and hire out help for the jobs you’d rather have the pros handle.
14. Reach Out to Family and Friends
Just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you have to isolate yourself from family members and good friends. Pick up the phone and call someone you haven’t talked to in a long time. Schedule a video chat to talk with and see your friend or loved one.
You can even schedule group time between different households so a whole bunch of friends and relatives can catch up, wherever everyone may live. Popular apps like WhatsApp make it possible to connect with friends in other countries and spend a great evening together catching up, even across the distance.
15. Take Up an Art-Related Pursuit
When you were a kid, you liked to draw. You did finger painting, sculpted with modeling clay, and built with plastic bricks. You could lose yourself in these pursuits for hours on end.
Why not take up art-related pursuits again? YouTube is a great resource for budding artists. Whether you’re interested in learning how to paint, draw, crochet, or make jewelry, you can find a free tutorial online to help get you started.
You can also try your hand at writing. Maybe you’re drawn to poetry; why not try writing some of your own? Or craft a short story you’ve been thinking about for a while. Write one chapter of a novel you have in mind.
Lose yourself in the joy of writing and creating art! It’s good for the soul.
16. Enjoy Good Music
How’s your music collection? There are so many different styles of music to enjoy these days. Why not expand your musical interests and listen to something new and different?
Pick from one of these categories and see what audio treasures you can find:
- Jazz
- Rock & Roll
- Musical Theatre
- Pop Music
- Hip Hop
- Rhythm & Blues
- Country
- Classical
- Disco
- Electronic Dance Music
- Folk Music
- Reggae
And the list goes on! What category do you gravitate to? You may consider getting yourself a Spotify account and exploring new artists and music categories to find a new favourite. Enjoy your musical adventure!
17. Expand Your Tea and Coffee Skills
Do you enjoy a good cup of tea? How about great coffee? You can expand your knowledge to create satisfying tea or coffee creations in your own kitchen.
It’s interesting to learn about the origins of coffee and tea, and it’s fun to experiment at home and learn how to make your own beverage specialties. If you get really good at it, you may decide to skip trips to the coffee shop (or save them for extra-special occasions) and instead indulge your love of coffee or tea in the comfort of your own home, thanks to your newest do-it-yourself beverage-making skills.
18. Relax in a Hot Tub
Hot tubs are made for relaxation! It’s a wonderful feeling to sink into a tub of bubbling water and feel the soothing warmth, plus the jets pulsating against your lower back. What an incredibly relaxing way to spend some quality time at home.
Hot tubs come in different shapes and sizes, so they can fit in most properties. Wellness Shop has a wide selection of hot tubs for sale that can seat as few as two to three people comfortably, and as many as eight to nine people to accommodate larger groups.
We also have different styles and designs, including Nordic Hot Tubs™ and C-series. In addition, we have beautiful, top-quality pre-owned hot tubs for anyone mindful of their budget.
For those who may want a little added flair and protection surrounding their new hot tub, we also have beautiful gazebos available, perfect for completing your outdoor hot tub escape zone.
19. Work-Life Balance for a Healthy Lifestyle
Many people now work remotely from home. If you’re in this situation, we want to share a couple of additional healthy lifestyle ideas and considerations with you.
Especially if you’re new to the work-from-home arrangement, it can take a while to get used to this setup and set healthy boundaries between work and free time.
Make sure you’re not spending all your time working! Strive to achieve a healthy work-life balance for a more positive mental outlook, greater satisfaction, and a healthier body. If you do not take the time to relax and enjoy life, you’ll create stress, and it will affect both your career and your personal life.
20. Take Healthy Breaks
Make it a habit to take breaks and schedule plenty of “off-work” time to create better boundaries between your work time and your free time. During your breaks, try one of the many health-boosting activities we recommend in this article.
Whether you take fifteen minutes to soak in a hot tub, take an afternoon break to work on your garden, improve your home with a sauna, take a refreshing walk in your nearby park, or spend some quality time enjoying music, you will do yourself a world of good.
Not only will you feel better and more relaxed, but you will be more productive at work, too. Take the time to do the things you enjoy in life and see how your health receives a wonderful boost!