Four Ways to Fit a Workout into Your Schedule
Every year, people tell themselves that they are going to start working out because they are dissatisfied with their bodies or want to live a healthier lifestyle. Exercise offers numerous advantages to both your body and your mind, and you can do it in numerous ways. Running and swimming build up your cardio muscles and reduce your risk of heart disease. Weight lifting increases muscle mass and helps you to lose weight. Flexibility exercises such as stretches can substantially improve your balance and relieve you of pains and aches. Sadly, the gains of exercises are avoided by people who fail to work up the motivation to spend the money, time, and energy on routine trips to the gym. Fortunately, the time and resource costs of exercise are significantly smaller than often perceived. Here are three ways you can fit a workout plan into your busy schedule.
1: Find Ways to Be Time Efficient
It is obviously far easier to fit a workout into your busy schedule when the exercises do not take two hours. As a result, many people who start to exercise eventually decide to stop due to a “lack of time” brought about by their emphasis on long and tedious exercises. Thankfully, there are a vast assortment of exercises which you can complete in 30 minutes to an hour. Some, even shorter, can be done in 10 minutes! The key to including exercise in your busy schedule is to reduce its intrusiveness as much as you can. Try exercising close to home to circumvent a drive to the gym and back. To do this, you can consider going for a jog in the neighborhood, swimming in your pool (if applicable), or investing in some exercise equipment which you can keep at home. Another way of increasing efficiency is to think of good exercises which you can do anywhere, so you don’t have to stop doing them when you travel out of town. Finally, no matter how much you tell yourself that you “don’t have the time to exercise” it is vital to remember that the time spent exercising gives you the energy and stamina to accomplish daily tasks much quicker. The marginal time spent exercising, therefore, ultimately creates free time more than it syphons it away.
2. Tailor Your Workout to Your Tastes
Everyone knows that working up the motivation to exercise can be a difficult task. How much more difficult it is, then, when the workouts are something that you despise doing? One mistake people make when they are formulating a workout schedule is to include exercises they hate when others provide the same benefit. When people include exercises in their schedule that they have absolutely no desire to do whatsoever, it leads to burn out and they will often talk themselves out of sticking to their new exercise routine. As a result, you should think of exercises you actually enjoy and substitute those whenever possible. For instance, if you can’t stand to go running, consider building your cardio muscles by going for a swim instead. Additionally, be sure to schedule your workouts wisely. If you are not a morning person, don’t torture yourself by waking yourself up at 5 AM to start exercising. Make space for it later in the evening. Overall, you know you better than anyone else, so be sure to tailor your exercises and times to your unique character.
3. Find Ways to Entertain Yourself During the Workout
One potential deterrent to exercise is it prevents us from enjoying our already-limited free time. You spend all day working and fulfilling other necessary obligations, the thought goes, so why spend extra time on the side doing something as thoroughly exhausting as working out? Well, as it turns out, you do not always have to choose between exercise and entertainment. Oftentimes, you can find ways to guarantee both. Even if you cannot find a single exercise you enjoy at all, an unlikely scenario, there are undoubtedly ways to make your work out session enjoyable to you. Consider bringing a friend as a workout buddy to keep you company and help you be sociable while exercising. For example, many home gyms include a television across from the exercise equipment. If you feel the need to watch the news or a movie while you are burning calories and lifting weights, then you can by all means do so! Even in exercises where this would be impossible, you can find other ways to take your mind off of how exhausting the workout process is. If you were jogging through the neighborhood, for instance, you can help make the time pass by listening to music, the radio, or podcasts at the same time. If you spend time during the day watching television or listening to music anyway, why not find a way to do it while at the same time doing something productive for your body?
4. Find Ways to Exercise on the Job
Some careers, such as that of being a REALTOR®, provide people with a seemingly 24/7 work day with very little free time in your schedule to do anything besides your job, much less exercise. Is the situation hopeless for people in this busy position? Thankfully, no. One of the best options for people who need to squeeze exercise into their unrelenting work schedule is to find ways to integrate the exercise into their actual work schedule. There a variety of approaches that you can take to do that, and your needs may vary depending on the actual job. For one thing, you can always opt for more physically demanding options when you have the chance. Take the stairs and not the elevator. Park further away from the building to add to the time that you spend walking at work. Even when you are at your desk, you have an increasing supply of options! You can invest in a standing desk or a treadmill desk to include some physical activity into your daily schedule. Even if you don’t want to buy extra equipment, there are dozens of exercises that you can do at your desk normally.
Though many people find their attempts to add working out to their schedule thwarted by disinterest or time constraints, it is clear that there are ways to keep exercise both interesting and time efficient. Coming up with ways to make exercise take up less of your time is far easier than people often think because workouts present you with so many different options. Workouts become even easier, though, when you don’t see it as merely a time sink but also view it as an opportunity to enjoy yourself. By focusing on workouts which you actually enjoy and tailoring your exercise to your unique schedule and personality, you take the chore out of this beneficial activity. Then, as if that wasn’t enough of an incentive, you can bring other methods of entertainment to your workout session with you or integrate it into your job to multitask! Fit in a workout schedule today using these techniques and you can enrich your health as well as your lifestyle.
