Building a routine to fit aerobic and resistance exercises into your weekly routine takes patience, perseverance, and practice! Unless you are among the fortunate few who have an overabundance of free time, it can seem almost impossible to carve out time every week to fit exercise in. Most of us have time for three sessions of resistance exercise and 150 minutes of aerobic activity in 7 days. (Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines )
For most people who work an average of 40 hours per week, you have approximately 26 hours per week of personal time (2 hours, five days a week, and 8 hours on each day off) to fit in extracurricular activities, personal care appointments, “me” time, work travel time, and miscellaneous errands. But where can that time be found? The Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines require 4 hours per week of your time, leaving you with 22 hours per week to take care of the extras of life outside of work and sleep.
Here are some suggestions to help you find your available time for physical activity:
Schedule your physical activity time in your weekly calendar, and make it as flexible as possible in case emergencies pop up. Move to the next day if you don’t achieve your goal for that day, it matters most that you stick with the big plan rather than being able to tick off the small boxes every day.
Keep resistance bands in your work bag or office location. In just a few available minutes, you can perform many upper-body and lower-body exercises in your office chair, workstation location or while taking your transit form.
Take the stairs at work, and skip the elevator.
Walk over your break or lunch hour. Get up every hour and move around.
Park your car farthest from a store entrance to gather extra steps. Large box stores provide excellent indoor walking locations when the weather is poor.
Walk your kids to school if time allows.
Get up earlier. Most people get up early enough, right?! This point focuses on getting up earlier only two to three days a week if scheduling physical activity doesn’t work for you later in the day.
When you space out early days through the week, you can thoroughly enjoy a few more winks on your off days.