If you do not like sports: ‘moderately intensive exercise’

Research shows that ‘moderately intensive exercise’ is key for a good mental and physical recovery during a burnout. Moderately intensive exercise means that your heart rate increases but that you can have a conversation during the effort, and that you are not out of breath. Examples of moderately intensive exercise are walking, cycling, swimming, taking the stairs, working in the garden, washing the car or vacuuming.

Adults only need thirty minutes of moderately intensive exercise per day. This may also be spread over the day, but must be done in blocks of at least ten minutes. 

There is also such a thing as the ‘step standard’. It’s advised that adults take 10.000 steps per day.

It is possible that you feel too tired to move during the first weeks of your sick leave. We advise you to take this back gradually after a few weeks.

In the next lesson we will start with the second major objective of this course, namely to prevent relapse. Prevention of relapse is important to ensure that your chances of relapse in a burnout are as small as possible after you have returned to work. In order to achieve this goal, we need to gain insight into the personal and organisational risk factors that have led to your burnout. Once we have identified these factors, we will then help you to reduce these risk factors by teaching you new skills.

In the next screen we will focus on ‘identifying and eliminating’ your personal risk factors.