Three Tips to Incorporate Fitness into Your Busy Life (ft. Coach Mike)

  January 18, 2016

Three Tips to Incorporate Fitness into Your Busy Life

As many of us have found, the further we travel into adulthood, the more our schedule becomes overloaded. Whether it’s dealing with increased pressures and responsibilities at work, completing what seems to be an endless list of household duties or simply enjoying the adventures of parenthood, we find our “free time” to be less and less available. When this happens, our non-essential activities (read: fun and hobbies), usually get pinched as a consequence. While it doesn’t hurt any of us to play X-Box a little less, it does harm us – literally – when we let health and fitness fall to the wayside.

 

 

As someone who has found plenty of excuses to avoid the gym over the last year, I thought it was only fitting to help out others who have fallen into a similar rut. So for those of you that have let life get in the way of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, here are three tips to help get you back on the right track.

 

 

• Make Fitness a Priority – As SCCF gym owner, spiritual guide and CrossFit philosopher Patrick Howell said, “No one is ever too busy for their priorities.” When your health and fitness are important to you, you change the components of your life to fit it in. Whether it’s heading to be earlier so you can wake up for the 5:30 a.m. class, foregoing some social activities (or hunting, ahem) to hit an evening class, or taking it easy Friday night so you can attend the Saturday morning WODs, there are always going to be options that enable you to get a couple great workouts in during the week. All it takes is a little pre-planning and desire.

 

• Get Help From Those Around You – Sometimes it’s not always possible to just change your schedule on a wimb without coordinating it with others. This is particularly true for those married and/or with children. With dinner, scheduled bedtimes, date nights and all of the other joys that accompany life with a significant other, making an impromptu trip to the gym after work isn’t always an option. However, like most other things in marriage, a solution can be found with a little give and take. Maybe it involves waking up early and going to 5:30 a.m. so you can be home the same time as your spouse. Or alternating gym days or times between you and your better half while the other watches the kids (since the couple that stays fit together looks better naked together!). Either way, if your spouse/GF/BF/FWB knows it’s important to you, they should be willing to work with you to make it happen.

 

• Develop a Routine – If you can get the first two steps to work, this one will be a cake walk. If you know that you can only fit three gym sessions in per week, go the same three days every week. The more you do something regularly, the more it should become second nature. Eventually, it will become such a habit, that any changes will cause you to paraphrase Sheldon Cooper, “But we can’t go out to eat on Monday night, Monday is gym night!” Yes, you may end up sounding like a whiny, idiosyncratic loon, but at least people will know you prioritize you fitness, and for that they will have respect. (Or troll you with meme and videos on social media, but it’s worth the risk.)

 

Long story short, achieving a healthy lifestyle has to be something you want to do. Everybody has somewhere else they could be and something else they could be doing. Those who live a fit life do it because it is important to them and they are willing to put in the work. Life will always be more than willing to provide an endless supply of excuses. It’s up to you to choose not to use them.