If you haven’t worked out for a while but would like to establish exercising as a habit, there might be one thing, above all other factors, currently hindering your chances: the belief that you simply don’t have time for it. The word “belief” is very important there, as that belief could easily turn out to be ill-founded.
True, many things compete for our time – including work, kids and our love lives. However, regardless of your exact situation, you can always free up time for a workout – and here are some major reasons why.
Some exercises take no longer than five minutes
Dr Pamela Abramson-Levine, who works as a family practice chiropractor in the Californian city of Santa Monica, is always quick to tear holes in her patients’ arguments that they lack the time to exercise.
In words to Thrillist, she explains that “sometimes I’ll ask the patients if they have five minutes. They almost always say, ‘Yes, but that’s not enough time.’ Then I show them exercises that take five minutes or less to perform.”
You probably just don’t have a plan
Quite simply, you need to have a plan; in a HuffPost article, fitness guru Karan Nijhawan even calls having a plan “the most important factor of your fitness”.
She further explains that you should look for an empty 10-15 minutes in your calendar and mark that time as your workout time. If you do this and are reminded of it later, it will be 80-90% likelier that you will indeed exercise, according to Nijhawan.
You could exercise early in the morning
Naturally, if you want to amass results that you can keep in the long term, you need to make working out a regular, rather than one-off, thing. If you are trying to determine a regular time when you could exercise, why not opt for early in the morning?
Masters runner Marie Wickham tells NBC News that, compared to habitually exercising later in the day, “it is much easier to keep to a morning schedule. You very seldom have early morning conflicts to cancel your run.”
You might not be following the right workouts
No matter what other advice in this article you heed, it will come to nothing if you don’t genuinely enjoy exercising. Hence, you should look for a physical activity you truly enjoy. Fortunately, there is a wide variety of physical activities from which you could choose.
Whether it’s something as conventional as running or lifting weights or something you hadn’t previously considered, like possibly dancing or swimming, it can all count towards your workout routine.
Exercise should be a way of life, not just another task
Once you find exercises you enjoy, you don’t necessarily have to struggle to establish working out as an intrinsic part of your day-to-day life. You could become eager to beat your previous running record, take part in a team sport or invest in high-quality tracksuits and other pieces of athleisure clothing. You know you’re on the right track when that starts happening.
