No Time to Exercise? (5 Step Guide for Busy People to Stay Fit & Motivated)

No Time to Workout?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or (CDC), reports that astonishingly 66% of American adults do not engage in regular leisure-time physical activity. One of the biggest reasons for this is usually because of a lack of time. If this is one of the main reasons you do not workout, there is some great news for you . By the end of this article, you will have a few simple tools to motivate yourself to exercise, even when you barely have enough time to relax. What’s best is that these points are so easy to follow, you’ll never need to motivate yourself again.

How to Motivate Yourself to Exercise When You Have No Time

Understand What Your Goals Are

The first thing that I always need to go over with people who don’t have enough time to exercise, is what their current goals are. Most people start exercising to look a little better, improve their health, and get more energy. Luckily, the amount of exercise you need to achieve these items is incredibly low. The American College of Sports Medicine or ACSM says that the amount of exercise you need every week is 150 minutes of moderate physical activity and 2 times per week of resistance training of every major muscle group. In other words, you need to do 150 minutes of a cardio activity that slightly raises your heart-rate and lift weights 2 times per week. When broken down over 7 days, that averages out to about 20 minutes of moderate cardio a day. These resistance training sessions don’t have to be very long and can last about 30 minutes tops. This means that you simply have to stack 2 of your 30 minute lifting sessions on top of a 20 minute cardio session during your week. When looking at the amount of exercise to be healthy, fitter, and live longer, 50 minutes twice a week and 20 minutes the other 5 days doesn’t look so bad. Now that we’ve addressed that, we can go over a few ways to fit this easier into your life.

Plan Out Your Days and Weeks

The next thing I recommend to individuals who have no time, is to get out their planner and start writing down their schedule. You will often find when doing this, that there is quite a bit of free time that pops up throughout the week. The days you have more free time, you can budget more time towards physical activity. The days without as much free time, you can slip in one of your 20 minute cardio days. Having the schedule planned out makes it easier on you, simply because you don’t have to spend energy deciding when you will workout during the week AND shows you that you actually have time to do it. But even if you have time, you won’t always feel energetic and in the mood to do it.

Make the Activity More Pleasurable

In order to make sure we adhere to going to the gym, even when we are feeling down, we need to make it more pleasurable. Most people don’t particularly love going to the gym when first starting out. Because of this, we can try to pair pleasurable things with the gym to increase our motivation. Having your favorite pre-workout drink before, allowing yourself to have a healthy smoothie afterwards, listening to your favorite music, and just doing exercises and activities you enjoy makes it much more likely that you will stick with it. I would recommend trying to wean off some of these things with time, but when you are unmotivated and strapped for time, these tools really help.

Before You Go On..

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Set Up Your Environment

In addition to making the gym more pleasurable, you can also set up your environment better to achieve a workout. If you workout in the at home, in morning, set your shoes, water bottle, and headphones right by your bed so it’s the first thing you see when you wake up. If you workout after work, bring your gym clothes in a bag, and place it directly by your locker or office, so you can transition quickly when you are off work. If you normally drive right by the gym every day on your way to get coffee, try to plan your day around that outing. Our environment often plays a huge role in why we don’t workout. Luckily, you can shift yours to become more advantageous. But even with this knowledge, you will still run into a huge issue.

One Day Means Nothing

What happens if you miss a day or two? Is all your progress completely wasted? Not at all. The one thing you can remember when fitting the gym into your life is that it really does need to fit your individual life. Some people will have not as many formal responsibilities, making it much easier to stay motivated to go. If you are filled to the brim with activities, remember the amount of exercise you need to even get a little benefits. Even if you are only able to workout a small amount that doesn’t reach those guidelines, you are still doing something good for your body in the long run AND mood in the immediate instance. Missing a couple days means nothing over the long term, as missing one day won’t make you unhealthy, just liking working out for one day makes you healthy. Working out all comes down to finding something you enjoy, and being consistent with it for a long time.

Wait!

To find out more about how to get the benefits of a weeks worth of exercise in just two days, I would recommend checking out the article below. Otherwise, you can view our daily low impact exercise program below to help you get your workouts in, in record time.

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