kaizen4health

The Short Version

When it seems like you have no time to exercise, Kaizen 4 health is a way to sneak little 4-minute workouts into your day throughout the day.  When you work at a desk job and sit most of the day, Kaizen 4 health is a way to remember to get up and move around for a few minutes once every hour. A 4-minute exercise session starts every hour on the hour.  Start now. 

The Long Version - The Backstory

In the spring of 2021, I read Robert Maurer's amazing book One Small Step can change your life. He recommended doing little spurts of exercise during the day instead of one big production at the end of the day. I decided that the best way to do this would be to set up a system in my house where every hour a little bell would go off reminding me to exercise, and immediately after the bell went off, a short exercise video would magically start playing.

I realized that since many of my reminder systems, like apps on my phone had failed in the past, the only way to make this work would be to use a dedicated device.  This device would have no other purpose other than running these exercise videos and I would make sure I didn't interfere with it, touch it, play with it or use it for anything else.

I calculated that since there were 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week, my video playlist would have to be 168 hours. However, most of that would be spacefiller on the screen. The exercises would only be cued up to run at the beginning of every hour during the workday.

My first dedicated device was a digital photo frame. This crashed very quickly and the videos kept skipping and stopping.

My second dedicate device was the entire playlist on a USB.  This waited a few days to crash, and eventually started skipping and stopping.

Before it started crashing, I found that I was really enjoying doing these short workouts and exercising this way in little spurts. So I wanted to share this with people,  but I didn't want to give them a crashing USB.

I realized that online video was more reliable than my USB, and found out about scheduled online TV.

I began using this method with a little cheap used Chromebook as my dedicated device. It worked wonderfully and got me exercising regularly for the first time in years.

Scheduled online TV allowed me to share this system with my family, friends, and now you.

I hope that this "Baby steps, a little at a time" approach will empower you to start exercising again as it did for me. 

Kaizen4health.com Creator

Carol Barrett