How Do I Find Time To Exercise?

Ever heard yourself saying “I don’t have time to exercise”. I’ve said it myself on occasion. But you know what? We all have the same 24 hours in a day. So to those of you who say “I don’t have time to exercise” I say, yeah, you do actually. You just choose not to.

Instead of saying you don’t have time to exercise, why not ask yourself “how do I find time to exercise’? You might find the answer surprisingly simple.

 

Know your priorities.

We don’t all have time to do every little thing on offer in our worlds today, so living smart these days is a case of prioritising what is important to you. If you’re reading this article, you must have at least some interest in exercising. Exercise is at least somewhat important to you, either because you enjoy exercising, you know it makes you feel good, or you know it is good for you and you need to exercise for your health.

Whatever the reason, be clear on why exercise is important. Then you need to figure out just how important it is in your life. Does it rate right up there with the welfare of your children, the pursuit of wealth, a raging social life, or is it a little lower on the order of what’s important to you? Remember that these things are not always mutually exclusive. Your physical health and mental wellbeing are extremely important for the welfare of your children. You can’t give your children the best part of you if you’re tired, run down and unhealthy, and exercise can make a real difference to your mental and physical health. You’ll also be a great role model for your kids if they see you exercising and making exercise a priority. Want to see your friends more? Why not go for a run with a friend, or join an exercise group with a friend, and both of you will meet more people?

 

Develop a Good Support System

Once you’ve figured out just where exercise sits on your list of priorities, you need to develop a good support system to help you keep it up. Schedule some exercise time for yourself, in consultation with anyone else who needs to make it happen. If you need your partner to spend time with the kids when you’re exercising, then make sure you involve them in your scheduling. Make sure they know how important exercise is to you, and how you will be a much nice person if you keep it up J. Over the years I’ve had heaps of my runners tell me their husbands won’t let them stop, because they become grumpy and hard to live with if they aren’t running.

If you find it hard to get away from work on time to enable you to exercise, then think about arranging to meet up with someone to exercise with. You’ll have to leave on time so you don’t let them down.  Or join a regular exercise group after work and have a trainer do all the thinking for you! Again, the commitment should get you out the door.

In another life I used to do a bit of rowing. The rest of my crew included a police woman, a midwife and a flight attendant, so trying to find a time to train was to say the least, challenging. So when we set our training times, they were cast in stone. There was no way I was going to let work get in the way of training. There was never anything so pressing in the office that I couldn’t walk away from to get to training on time.  Surprisingly (or not) when I stopped rowing, my office hours grew longer and longer. Where I used to leave work at 5:15 two or three afternoons a week, I was finding I was working till 7pm most nights, and all because I hadn’t developed a support system to replace my boat crew. It wasn’t that I liked exercising any less, I just didn’t have the same level of support around me. I didn’t know how to find time to exercise.

Exercising before the rest of the household is awake is also a good option, though it does take a bit of getting used to, and definitely some understanding from kids and partners. If you’re going to get up early to exercise, you need to be able to go to bed earlier so you’re not missing out on sleep.

 

Take the decision making out of exercise

We all like to think that we are good decision makers, but are we? Researchers at Ben Gurion and Columbia universities have shown that the decisions made by judges in parole hearings was more likely to be favourable to the prisoner if the hearing was at the beginning of the day or after a food break.

You’d expect consistent decision making in the courts, but the research shows judges are more likely to accept the status quo when a decision is needed after they’ve  already made a lot of decisions. So, extrapolating from this, if you have to consciously decide whether or not to exercise, and you’re deciding at the end of a decision filled day, you are more likely to decide to accept the status quo-that is you’ll decide against exercising.

So, don’t give your self the hard work of making a decision. Just get out, and do your exercise without thinking about it. Create a routine and stick to it, or get up and exercise first thing in the morning when you don’t have a chance to think about it. If you do deliberate first thing in the morning, you’ll be more likely to base a decision on what’s important to you, rather than what’s the easiest decision to come to.

If you know you are unlikely to exercise at night after you go home, then don’t go home first. If your kids tug at your heart strings, your shoes strings, or whatever else they can get their hands on, don’t buy into it. We’ve all had our kids cry their eyes out at the thought of their precious mummy leaving them, only to be told that they stopped crying as soon as you walked out the door.

Next time you hear yourself saying you don’t have time to exercise, don’t kid yourself. You do have time to exercise,  you just choose not to.

Instead, ask yourself  “how can I find time to exercise?”

 

Favourite Interval Training Session

Richard, what is your favourite interval training session?

“That depends on what I’m training for, and what stage of my training I’m at. My main focus is usually a 10km race, so I like to pull out this session every so often. It’s a great speed endurance workout, and terrific for helping you to run on how you feel, rather than any set time. The key is to really take notice of how you’re feeling in your warm up”

Warm up

10 min easy jog followed by 6 * 100-200m run throughs at the desired pace for the session. The main part of the session is run at perceived current 10km pace – ie the pace you could race a 10km fun run right at the time of the training session.

You can use these run throughs to help you determine how fast you should do the main part of your session. Either use a Garmin to measure your distance and pace, or do the session on a track.

Run through a couple of 200’s at an effort that you feel you could run your 10km at. After the first few, you should have a good feel for what sort of pace you’re on for the session. Then you can assess what pace you’re running at, and apply that pace to the main part of your session.

So, to clarify (hopefully).

Easy run for 10 mins

2 -4 * 200m run throughs at a pace that you feel you could race a 10km in, based on how you feel right now, when you’re running, NOT based on previous times, PB’s, or times you’re hoping to achieve in the future. In fact, not based on time at all, just on how you’re feeling.

Once you’re comfortable that you’ve got the pace you can race 10km in, have a look at the actual pace you are going. Do another 2 or 3 * 200 and either using a Garmin or other GPS device, look at the pace you are going, or time the 200m and multiply by 5 to get your KM pace.

Core Session

10*1km @ perceived 10km pace (as assessed in warm up)

30 sec standing recovery between each 1km interval

Cool down

10 min easy jog followed by some stretching.

 

Tell us your favourite running session.

Running With The Kenyans

Running with the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn, is a great read, and is now one of my ‘Top Shelf’ books.

Despite his rather “un-anglo” name, the author is an anglo-saxon English guy who felt he never quite reached his potential as a runner and is keen to find out ‘the Kenyan secret’. Even though he’s not what you would call a top runner (38 min for 10K), he and his family move to the town of Iten, in Kenya, to live and train with some of the fastest distance runners on earth, Finn’s keen to see if he can work out exactly what makes the Kenyan’s so good. As you’d expect, it’s not a simple answer.

One of the keys to the success of Kenyan running, is Brother Colm, who Finn spends some time with. Brother Colm is an Irish priest, who came to Kenya in the 1970’s to teach at a local school. He inherited the athletics coaching position, even though he knew absolutely nothing about the topic, but he has since produced dozens of Olympic Gold medallists, World Champions, and World Record holders from 800m to the Marathon. You could say he has an abundance of ‘fairly’ good talent to choose from, however he’s obviously used it wisely.

There are plenty of great anecdotes throughout the book. A favourite of mine is when the author is trying to phone a 2hr 4min marathoner..He happens to call the wrong number, but not to worry, the person who picks up the phone is a 2 hr 5 min marathoner, so he’ll do. In most parts of the world, 2 hr anything marathoners are fairly hard to come by! Talk about a concentration of champions. Of the 4000 people living in and around the town of Iten, 1000 are full time athletes!

I found this book very easy to read. It flowed along nicely without getting bogged down in the detail of his daily life. Throughout the story the author gradually builds the relationships he is developing with his ‘team’ of Kenyans who are training for the Lewa Marathon with him, Finn’s first. Running your first marathon is intimidating enough, but add to it the hazards of running through the open African savanah (read: LIONS!), and you’ve got a real challenge on your hands.

Finn’s descriptions of his early morning runs evoke wonderful images of runners making their way to the meeting spot in the pre-dawn African light. Nothing needs to be pre-arranged. Everyone knows where to meet. You just show up at 6am, and (if you’re a white guy), hope you can keep up the pace.

Anyone interested in running and/or wishing to improve their running will get a great deal from the book, through inspiration, some technical advice, and finding out the secret to what makes these Kenyans so good.

Happy Reading

You can grab a copy of Running With The Kenyans from the Book Depository. Right now the soft cover edition is 40% off, at $18.71. And you receive free shipping worldwide.

Motivational Quotes

Having spent almost the entire week prior to Christmas working in my backyard from literally dawn to dusk preparing the area for turf, I went into the holiday period ill-prepared on the reading front. I can usually rely on at least one good book or a gift certificate at a book shop for Christmas, but none were forthcoming this year. It was slim pickings indeed when I went to the bookshelf to find something I hadn’t  already read. My husband is keen on biographies and autobiographies, so I picked up a biography of Barry Humphries and also a book by Jack Gibson (Rugby League coach).

 

I’m still only half way through the Barry Humphries biography-one of those books you keep reading because it’s mildly interesting and you think it must get better soon. I did discover that terms such as “technicolour yawn” “liquid laugh” and “siphon the python” entered the Australian vernacular as a result of Humphries’ film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. Clearly not the most riveting book if that’s all I’ve drawn from it!

 

On the other hand, and quite surprisingly, Jack Gibson’s 4th book, The Last Word is very good. I recently read Wayne Bennett’s latest offering (also a Rugby League coaching legend) but didn’t get that much from it. I stuck with it till the end, but as a coach, it didn’t light any fires for me. Not being at all interested in Rugby League probably didn’t help! I was therefore delighted to find The Last Word offers much food for thought from both a coaching and a personal point of view. The first part of the book is written by Gibson and the second is a collection of quotes he noted down over the years. Some are altered slightly to suit the coaching idiom. Here are just a few:

 

Time is a created thing. To say “I don’t have time’ is like saying ‘I don’t want to.’ LAO-TZU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER AND TEACHER. (If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say they don’t have time to exercise, I’d be a very rich woman).

 

The first time you quit it’s hard. The second time it gets easier. The third time you don’t even have to think about it. PAUL BRYANT. AMERICAN FOOTBALL (Precisely why we like you to try to make up any missed sessions ASAP).

 

A leader takes people to where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be. ROSALYNN CARTER, WIFE OF THE 39THUS PRESIDENT (Keep this one in mind when I ask for that little bit extra effort)

 

A player’s performance tends to rise or fall to meet the coach’s expectations. FRANK F. HUPPE, BUSINESS CONSULTANT AND MOTIVATOR. (Ever felt you couldn’t possibly do what I’ve asked you to do, but you surprise yourself by doing it? Generally, I’m not surprised. You are all capable of so much).

 

Nothing is so simple that it can’t be misunderstood. JUNIOR LEAGUE MAGAZINE (Definitely one for me to keep in mind!)

 

Half of getting what you want is knowing what you must give up to get it. ROBERT ANTHONY, PSYCHOLOGIST AND MOTIVATOR

 

Whatever your past has been, you have a spotless future. MELANIEGUSTAFSON,US HISTORIAN (All too often I see people sabotaging their efforts by looking back rather than forwards. If you eat a chocolate for breakfast, that’s no reason to continue eating junk for the rest of the day!)

 

I think the covers are too far apart. AMBROSEBIERCE,US AUTHOR AND SATIRIST, WHEN ASKED TO COMMENT ON A PARTICULAR BOOK.

 

Nothing happens until someone steps forward and says “You can count on me” ROB GILBERT, EDITOR, BITS & PIECES

 

Share the quotes or sayings which you use for motivation below.