Your schedule is packed but you want to make time for exercising. How do you do it? If you’re trying to get fit and healthy, making time for exercising is important, but it can seem impossible to find time in your busy schedule to go to the gym for a workout, go for a run, or even do some exercises at home.
We put together some tips that can help you, though, if you’re struggling to make time in your life for an exercise routine. You might have to make some modifications to make these work for the kind of exercises you want to do or for your particular schedule, but hopefully, this list can help you.
1. Exercise during Daily Tasks
You may have specific kinds of exercises you want to do, but even so, it can benefit you to turn housework time or the time you spend running errands into exercise time. Instead of driving or taking transport to do some of your daily errands, you may be able to walk there. As you move around your house doing chores, try using exaggerated, stretching movements. As you lift items to put them where they go, you can lift them up and down a few times to help build muscle and flexibility. These may seem like silly things to do, and they may not seem like they’ll make much of a difference, but if you start to think about exercise in your daily routine, you can find lots of little ways to burn more calories, build muscle, and become fitter just by doing daily tasks in a different way.
2. Take the Stairs Rather Than Elevator
If you take the elevator to get to your apartment or your work, try using the stairs instead. This may not always be feasible, depending on how many floors you have to go up or down, but taking the stairs for even a few floors each day can make a huge difference. Walking up and down stairs is a very effective exercise that’s going to increase endurance and help to tone your legs and midsection. You may want to be careful about when you do this kind of activity, as it may cause you to sweat more easily. You might want to save using the stairs for when you’re done with your workday and when you’re headed home and can take a shower afterward.
3. Free up Some Time
What takes up a lot of your free time each day? When you’re not working, how are you spending the rest of your day? If you do housework at home, you can hire someone to do that for you. A professional cleaning service can do the housework and give you extra time to exercise. If you have kids you need to care for after work, you may want to hire a babysitter for an hour or two every now and then to give you time to exercise. If you spend a lot of time cooking for yourself for your family, it may be beneficial to buy prepared dinners or order in every now and then to make extra time in your schedule to exercise.
You may feel like you’re cheating, wasting your money, or not keeping up with your responsibilities when you do these kinds of things, but the payoff is that you have extra time to exercise and improve yourself. You may not want to hire out these kinds of tasks every day, but doing it a few times a week can make a big difference in your exercise routine.
4. Buy Gym Equipment
Do you feel like you spend a lot of time traveling from your home or work to the gym, waiting on equipment in the gym to open up for you to use, and then traveling back home from the gym? You may not want to cut out your gym trips entirely, but you can get some of the same benefits at home just by buying exercise equipment to keep there. Even if your space is limited, you could buy small items like an exercise ball or weights that could be stored in a corner of your home and used when you don’t have time to go to the gym or you just want to give yourself a few extra hours in the day.
What you may find is you actually spend more time exercising when you have gym equipment in your home. You won’t find yourself as prone to making excuses about how bad the weather is or how much it costs to get to the gym when you can just do some of your exercises at home.
5. Exercise While You Work
We gave you a tip earlier about finding ways to work out while you are doing daily tasks, but do you realize you could be exercising while you work? Being able to do this depends on what kind of work you have and what kind of work environment you are in, but you can turn your work time into exercise time periodically. Here are a few suggestions for how to do that:
• Stand while you type
• Walk in place while you dictate
• Perform chair raises while sitting
• Do lunges and other stretching exercises from your chair
• Periodically stand up and do a few jumping jacks, toe touches, or other exercises
There are a lot of different exercises you could be doing at a workstation, at a desk, and even while sitting in a chair. Whichever part of your body is not engaged in work at the moment can be engaged in some kind of exercise. You can raise your legs and set them back down or make circles with your arms. When doing exercises at work, however, take it easy and slow at first, because you don’t want to wear yourself out on the job. Give your body time to adjust to your new workout regimen but look for opportunities to do a tiny workout throughout the workday.
