Chapter 4: Fitness

Want to feel happier, look better, and live longer? Try designing your environment to make exercise automatic.

The Happy Healthy Wealthy Productive Sustainable (HHWPS) project is all about building environments that make wholesome actions automatic. Nowhere is this idea more powerful than with fitness.

Ironically, that’s also why this was one of the shorter chapters. The principles are so simple that there really isn’t all that much to say about the matter.

But simple does not mean easy. As an example, here are my top recommendations for a life of totally effortless fitness:

• Build a car-free lifestyle
• Locate your home close to nature
• Acquire a set of skills that make movement fun
• Ingrain yoga and strength training deep into your routines

Once these four elements are all set up, fitness becomes a breeze. But getting to this point takes plenty of time and effort.

The six articles in this chapter are written to reduce this time and effort to the bare minimum.

How Fit are You?

We start off with six simple tests to check where you stand fitness-wise. All tests are adjusted for age and gender and come with some commonsense advice for improvement.

4 Skills that Guarantee Lifelong Fitness

Dance, ride, play, and pose your way into the spontaneous fitness valley shown in the title image. With these skills, exercise goes from being a chore to being a joy. And once exercise becomes joyful, you’ll be fit for life!

The World’s Best Fitness Tool

Spoiler: This miraculous fitness tool is nothing other than a smartly located home. If you position your life for car-free living and easy access to nature, fitness happens all by itself.

How to Maintain Decent Muscle Tone with Minimal Effort

It takes me only four minutes a day to maintain a physique that’s genuine fun to see in the mirror. This article shares the four steps to gaining this rare privilege with the tiny investment of 0.3% of your day.

4 Great Fitness Synergies for Those Who Live Behind Their Computers

Does your role in society involve hour upon hour of staring at a screen? Mine too! Luckily, this is not such a fitness curse as it may seem. In fact, there are several beautiful synergies that can make nerds fitter and more creative.

7 Paths to Greater Happiness Through Fitness

Exercise is our most natural antidepressant (and it seems pretty effective, too). But the fitness strategy of slaving away at the gym gets this fitness-happiness link all wrong. Instead, this article consults the science of happiness to find how best to move for maximum wellbeing.

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