Sometimes, life gets crazy. Maybe your travel schedule forces you to get creative with your exercise at the hotel. Maybe you just don’t care for going to the gym but would like to do some form of weightlifting exercises. Maybe purchasing weights and other gym equipment isn’t in the budget for you right now. Whatever the reason is, if you must get creative with your exercise equipment, I hope you reuse some plastic!
3 ways to reuse plastic and create your own home workout.
- Plastic water bottles with the built-in handle. Have you ever seen the reusable bottles at the store that look like miniature water cooler bottles? Fill those with water and use them for bicep curls, shoulder lateral raise, or a bent over row. If you’re not quite ready for that much weight you can use a single use water bottle instead.
- Speaking of single use water bottles…you could fill a few of those with water and put them in a backpack. Hold the top handle of the backpack and use it like a kettle bell, put the pack on your back and do squats, or hold the backpack by the sides while sitting on the floor and do Russian twists.
- Anyone have a billion plastic grocery bags? We use them for poo pick up, lining bathroom and office bins but you can also use them for exercise. Fold two in half (one for each foot) and use them to slide your feet doing mountain climbers or keep your feet together (hands on the floor) slide your feet up to your hands and do ab curls.
If you can find positive and productive ways to use and reuse, I’m all for it. Plastic is not good for our environment or for our bodies. If you read my article last week on saving the turtles, you learned about microplastics and how they’re created. Microplastics are entering the human body through ingestion or inhalation – we’re all exposed, and scientists agree on that. There are plenty of studies and evidence that show exposure to plastic imitates hormones and mess up the signals in our bodies. Correlation between exposure and PCOS and endometriosis in women has been established; correlation between a mother’s exposure and a child’s ADHD; and breast cancer in children whose mothers were exposed to the endocrine disrupting pesticide DDT.
Exposure to the plastic can cause a whole host of problems. Everything from inflammation to genotoxicity to oxidative stress. We eat it, we drink it, we breathe it. If you haven’t overhauled your food storage containers, hair and bath care products, cosmetics, or laundry soaps yet those are great places to start the clean-up.
If you’d like to know if plastics are affecting your body or would like help with the home plastic overhaul, please schedule a call with me to talk about food and chemical sensitivity testing and a plan to detox your body and your home.