Get More Movement in Your Day With Sea Shanty Squats

Sea Shanty Squats? Yes. You read that correctly.

What does that have to do with home improvement, old houses, and DIY?

Absolutely nothing.

I just didn’t want my regular readers to get into a reading rut. I consider it my duty to keep you on your toes. Hence the Sea Shanty Squats.

Are you saying, “What in the world? Has she lost her ever-loving mind?”

Possibly?

Not every day, but almost every day around 5 o’clock when I’m tasked with the ~~chore~~ privilege of making my family dinner that one of them will inevitably complain about, I find the time to do some Sea Shanty Squats.

What is this brilliant alliterative nonsense?

I do squats while listening to two consecutive sea shanties.

Sea shanties are pirate songs. Think choral music, typically sung by a male voice or a group of male voices to the theme of a pirate adventure.

Trust me, you can’t be sad listening to a sea shanty. It’s good fun.

I was looking for a way to incorporate more movement into my daily routine. I already take a daily walk, but I’m getting older and I don’t want to lose muscle mass.

I decided to add squats into my daily routine because my legs are where I have the most jiggle in my wiggle.

I tried doing a set number of squats per day and that was not working out for me. I tried doing squats for a set amount of time per day and that was also a bust.

However, I LOVE music and can endure almost anything for the length of a song. That’s really what I’m doing – enduring the pain, but doing it while listening to sea shanties makes it more bearable.

Exercising for a certain number of songs is a rough way of keeping time. In 2019, Fortune reported that the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was 3 minutes, 30 seconds in length.

That means doing squats for the length of two sea shanties is roughly 7 minutes of exercise. Not too shabby, right? Aye, aye!

If squats aren’t the right exercise for you, you could do Sea Shanty Situps, Sea Shanty Stretches, Sea Shanty Scissorkicks, Sea Shany Sprints, Sea Shanty Supermans, Sea Shanty Side Planks, Sea Shanty Shoulder Presses…

I’ll stop before this turns into the Bubba Gump shrimp list of exercises starting with the letter S.

If you don’t enjoy sea shanties, for the love of Pirates of the Caribbean, don’t tell me that!

The takeaway here is that you too can probably endure a bit more movement in your day if you put it to music. March in place, dance around your kitchen, or do something else that gets your blood flowing and your muscles working to whatever song you enjoy.

Your body and mind will be happy you did.

Be sure and come back for my next blog post, which will most definitely be home-related. I need to put the universe back in alignment. Ha!

P.S. I like adding movement into my day with these Sea Shanty Squats because I can do squats no matter what I’m wearing. (Thanks, stretchy jeans!) I definitely raise my heart rate with this burst of activity, but I’m not necessarily getting all sweaty like I would with a 30-minute workout.

I usually do regular squats for the first song and then plié squats and plié squat pulses for the second song. I don’t worry about how many I’m doing. I just focus on continuous movement and correct form.

P.P.S. I have better luck with turning an activity into a habit if I pair that activity with something else that I already do. For instance, lately any time I reheat my coffee in the microwave, I count down the seconds by doing wall pushups.

Basically, I’m maximizing those ‘waste of time’ moments to my benefit. I don’t know how long I’ll do Sea Shanty Squats, but until I get bored with it or come up with something different I’m keeping up this habit.

My three favorite sea shanties:

Wellerman by Nathan Evans: view on YouTube

One More Pull by Wellerman and The Longest Johns: view on YouTube