There’s Always Enough Time to Exercise
May 08, 2017Don’t have time to exercise? Nice try, but you aren’t getting out of it that easily. The truth is that there is enough time to exercise. Learn how to make it happen here!
For many of us, getting enough regular exercise is tough. You know the health benefits, and you want to look better, but it’s hard. If there’s anything I’ve learned from working with people over the past decade, it’s that everyone is busy, and everyone struggles to get it all in. This is probably why when it comes to excuses a person has for not exercising regularly, one of the most common out there is: I’m too busy. There’s not enough time.
I have had to face down this question on many occasions with clients, and the first thing I like to bring up is pretty much the same for everyone: Everyone has the same amount of time. We all have 24 hours per day, and 168 hours per week to get everything in. And as I just mentioned, we’re all busy. Whether you’re a type A productive giant or a couch potato, odds are you feel like you have your hands full on a regular basis. So how on earth do some of us fit exercise into the equation?
The simple answer is by prioritizing. You can tell your priorities by how you spend your time. Since every person on earth has the same amount of time to get everything done every day and every week, the easiest way to see what matters to a person is how they spend this finite resource. If I asked you to make a list of your entire week, how much time would go down to commuting to work? What about watching TV? And social media? You can see what I’m getting at. If you’re at all normal, odds are you’re spending hours each week watching television, checking your profiles, and doing all sorts of other downtime activities that don’t do much for your health, your happiness, or your productivity.
Now, take a moment to think about how much of a time commitment exercise really is. Let’s say you’re a novice who wants to do a little strength training and a little jogging. A great program for such an individual would be two 45 minute strength training workouts per week, and two 30 minute jogging sessions. That level of activity would be enough for 50+% of the population to see health benefits, as well as improvements in appearance, confidence, and physical function. And how much time did it really take? If we add the minutes for each activity, 45+45+30+30=150, we get 150 minutes of total exercise. Per Week! That’s just about two and a half hours out of the 168 hours per week we all have to get everything we need to do in. I can guarantee almost everyone reading this spends more time on down-time activities than this!
So we may have established that you do have the time and you just need to change your priorities, but what about the truly busy people? There are some of us out there who are literally scheduled every minute of the day, so when can they work out? A great thing to keep in mind here is that even Presidents of the United States have found time to exercise daily. And if they can do it, anyone can. I’ve personally worked with many incredibly busy clients who still managed to exercise daily. A trick I’ve often seen them employ is getting up very early to train first thing in the morning. This ensures that there are no distractions or interruptions, and the early hours of the morning are almost never scheduled for anyone, so conflicts are a non-issue.
The bottom line is as they say: if you want something bad enough, you’ll find a way, and if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Finding time to exercise is hard. We’re all busy, we’ve all got a finite amount of time, and sometimes life can be exhausting enough without adding physical stress and strain into the equation. However, I can guarantee you there’s not a person out there who regrets making the time to exercise a priority. For a relatively small commitment of your week, you will look better, feel better, and live longer. That’s a worthwhile investment if I’ve ever seen one.