The Reality of Too Busy to Exercise
If you’re like most busy professionals, you want to exercise more. You want to wake-up to workout more frequently, you want to finally start taking that yoga class or make that 7 am live online bootcamp.
And then time and again, life just gets in the way. You’re too busy.
You work too late. You’re booked into an 8 am meeting. You have commitments that you just can’t miss and stay up late to get it done. And in all the hustle and hard work, exercise gets squeezed out.
This, in reality, is most people’s experience of exercise.
The truth is, those spare hours in the week are not going to materialize. We need to come up with a different solution.
I remember my first 60-hour workweek. I was 16 years old and was working 2 jobs that summer. At the end of the week, I stared out my bedroom window feeling emotional and confused as to why my brain didn’t feel right. I tallied up the hours from 5 hours working here and then going to work a shift over there and my tally arrived at 60 hours of work that week. That was my first glimpse that sure, I could physically work those kinds of long-hours but without a solution, I didn’t work right.
The real life of a professional…
As a professional, I’ve averaged 50 hours of work a week for most of my career. With some weeks in excess depending on the time of year or project deadlines (oh, year-end life for a professional accountant). Yet for over a decade, I haven’t missed more than a few weeks a year of exercise.
I get it. As professional women, we often feel like we don’t have a lot of extra time left in our day for exercise. But that’s only because we downplay the value of exercise beyond the physical aspects.
We can fall into the common belief that exercise is done for physical reasons like weight loss. That you exercise when you have a physical goal in mind – tone up, run further, or get a badge in your fitness class app.
When the truth is, exercise has important benefits in all aspects of your life, including your career and personal relationships.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Over the past decade, studies clearly indicate that our mental firepower is directly linked to our physical regimen such as Improved concentration, prolonged mental stamina and lower stress.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Exercise also elevates MOOD, which has serious implications for workplace performance and personal relationships. I’m willing to bet that your job requires you to build interpersonal connections and foster collaborations.
Your mood also has a critical role in your personal relationships. You’re more likely to be irritated with your spouse not handling dinner when you walk in the door or short with your kids if your mood is volatile.
What prevents most of us from exercising more often?
For many of us, the answer is simple: We don’t have the time.
In fairness, this is a legitimate explanation. There are weeks when work is overwhelming and deadlines outside our control need to be met.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
What we really mean when we say we don’t have time for an activity is that we don’t consider it a PRIORITY given the time we have available.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Exercise enables us to soak in more information, work more efficiently, and be more productive.
And yet many of us continue to perceive it as a luxury; an activity we’d like to do IF ONLY we had more time.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Exercise is NOT “me time”…
Personally, I don’t view exercise as something “I do for myself”, and I don’t call it “me time”. I consider physical activity as a necessity. Exercise for me is as important as reviewing my work calendar for upcoming week to be organized, calling back a client etc.
Even though like many, I started into exercise for weight loss reasons, I kept going all these years for the non-physical reasons. Primarily, improved mood, more energy and better focus so that I could be more productive and get what I needed to get done in 40 hours of work instead of 50 hours.
New research backs this up and demonstrates a clear relationship between physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposive – and one’s ability to have better work-life balance.
Also, those who exercise regularly are less likely to experience conflict between their work and home roles. That’s a somewhat counterintuitive finding…. an exercise regimen is, after all, yet another draw on our scarce time – and often deleted from our lives as working women for exactly that reason.
This means that you’re first step is not to get better at time management, but instead to shift the long-held and common belief that exercise is a selfish indulgence that inevitably requires some sacrifice on either the work or home. That’s incorrect. You work better, smarter, faster and happier when you regularly exercise.
Successfully incorporating exercise into your routine IS the work that needs to be done now and in the many chapters to come in your career and life.
Three ways busy professionals can exercise more often…
So, what do we do to put this into action so that even during our busiest workweeks, we still get the benefits of exercise? There’s three ways I suggest to do this based on over a decade of personal experience alongside helping hundreds of other working women do the same.
The first two are tactics to use during your busy weeks, while one is a tactic to use before and after your crazy busy workweeks.
ONE – Lower your expectations of what exercise is. Exercise has no lower limit. Every bit counts. But setting the bar too high during a crazy busy work week like 4 workouts that are 45-minute workouts is a recipe for consistent failure. The mistake many of us make is to assume that it’s all or nothing. Either you’re training for your weight loss goals or you’re doing nothing at all.
When in fact, walking for 15 minutes, four times a day burns as many calories as walking steadily for an hour.
During my own extra busy weeks, I wake-up, pour myself a cup of coffee and peddle on my spin bike for 20 min while I sip coffee still in my pajamas. Then during the day, take two 15 min walks when by brain is fried. I always come back more able to crush that balance sheet preparation in excel. And I accumulated over 45minutes of exercise in the margins of my day.
TWO – Match your exercise to your mental capacity and vibe. A specific workout plan is helpful most of the time. But during your extra busy workweeks, just the thought of a tough workout can keep you from showing up.
I often avoid my heavy leg day workout on a busy workday. BUT I don’t skip my exercise. Instead, I do upper body which I quite enjoy or a follow along workout video where someone else directs me what to do (and I can exercise more on auto-pilot).
Instead of skipping your workout, show up for the opportunity to exercise and choose an activity that feels more doable for you. YouTube has many “follow along workout” videos you can try…. the world of exercise is at your beck-and-call these days with technology.
THREE – Work on solidifying your ROUTINE of exercise. It’s not practical to tackle this as a habit during your crazy busy work weeks. This is the work that needs to be before and after your intense weeks.
The objective is make exercise habit, part of your routine, just what you do and a part of your lifestyle.Once you have exercise as of your routine, you just do it. It’s easier and you are no longer having to “make time” for it, you just do it.
You then reap the benefits of exercise all year long, and do it automatically during your busy weeks.
Remember, there will always be disruptions in this high paced life we lead. Yet, it’s not about how you exercise in a good week, it’s about how quickly you recover from a bad one.
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