Nick Crocker, a personal coach who helps people lead more active lives, had an excellent post in the HBR Blog Network called Find Exercise in Life’s Margins. Here’s a few excerpts:
“You consider yourself a fit, active person. But, like most busy professionals, you want to exercise more…And then time and again, life just gets in the way. You’re too busy. You work too late…You book a breakfast meeting. You have work and social commitments that you just can’t miss. And in all the chaos, exercise gets squeezed out. This, in reality, is most people’s experience of exercise.
The reality is, those spare hours in the week are not going to materialize. We need to come up with a different solution. The key is to find exercise in the daily flow of your life. Doing so will boost your productivity, performance and job satisfaction.”
- Exercise has no lower limit. Every bit counts. Setting the bar too high is a recipe for consistent failure.
- Forget sedentary days and weeks immediately. Your exercise past is not your future. Deeming yourself an exercise failure is a pointless judgment to make.
- Plan to lose a week a month for the unexpected. It’s not how you exercise in a good week. It’s about how quickly you recover from a bad one.
- Don’t tie exercise to weight goals. Exercising more may make it harder to eat less, since you’re likely to be hungrier more often. Instead, see exercise as a constant, not an intervention to solve a problem. Diets end, exercise never should.
- Orient to social and playful. If exercise is painful, you’re doing it wrong. Find exercise that feels playful or enjoyable for you.
- Exercise in the margins. Instead of taking the elevator at work, take the stairs. Once in the morning, once at night, and twice (up and down) when you go for lunch….
So, it’s off to my run this morning…enough talking about exercise – TIME TO GET AT IT.
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Live & Learn 
I missed my workout on Friday. This was very comforting.
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Good!
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Great post–I especially like “orient to playful and social.”. I view exercise as my time to indulge myself, focus on me, blow off steam, feel alive, gab with gym friends that I don’t see anyplace else. A good couple of hours in the gym gives me a high like nothing else.
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Given your discipline, I’m not surprised. I blogged on to “Exercise has no lower limit.” 🙂
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GREAT, realistic, and helpful advice… 🙂
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Thanks…..
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I’m headed to the donut shop…anybody else?
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Don’t tempt me Leonard, don’t tempt me. You know me and donuts. If you missed my post on the subject, here’s the link:
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I’m starting my in-between-times exercise program right now (and not tying it to weight control). Can you see me? I’m doing it right now, giving my fingers a vigorous workout on my keyboard. Some of the letters are even worn off the keyboard. The E and the N are completely rubbed off. Thanks for inspiring me!
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Hmmmmmmmmm…..
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Great points, I Started going to the gym with my daughter when she was 16 to encourage weight loss for her and a bonding time for us. She is now married and almost 27 we still meet 3 times a week in the early a.m. Before work, we love it! It is our special time together. You have to find your drive to make the commitment, mine was quality time with Beth.
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What a fantastic ritual…good for you Tina.
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It is called “keeping connected”.
Thanks David
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Most of these resonate. As soon as my focus switched from losing weight to general fitness and well-being, everything went better. Some weight loss became a pleasant side effect. And those margins can really add up.
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Sounds like you have it licked. My challenge is less on the work-outs and more on the bouts of gorging. If I could like the sporadic gorging, I think we’d be in decent shape. 🙂
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Thanks for your post! I missed a couple of workouts while my family was visiting, but time with them was more important as my mom is getting older, and now I am back to my routine. Making exercise enjoyable was key for me. It helps me stick to my routine and even crave it.
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Hi Elise. I’d be happy with missed “a couple” of workouts…good for you to be so disciplined. Have a good weekend.
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Some recent studies indicates that fast intensive exercise of less than 15 minutes each day can be as good as a slow hour run.
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I need to try this…because I’m not getting to the 1 hour slow run either.
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