more photos on flickr >>

 

(This is cross-posted at BlogHer.)

Time. There isn’t enough of it, right? After all, if you could add additional hours to your day, certainly you could find more opportunities to be active.

Here’s the thing. If you look around, you’ll find a lot of people who don’t believe that a lack of time is a good excuse for not doing something – especially when it comes to working out. Certainly there will be days when we don’t feel like moving our bodies. But if you get that feeling, own it. Tell it like it is. Say, “I just don’t want to do it today. I’d rather sit here with my laptop, put my feet up, and read blogs.”

Believe me, I’ve said those words. But when I have those days where I don’t feel like working out, I don’t tell myself it’s because I don’t have enough time. And yes, I realize I probably have more free time than, say, a woman with multiple children – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And if you can’t fit in a long workout all at once, it’s perfectly okay to split things up.

Carmen is the mother of six children (which means if anyone should have an excuse not to exercise, it’s her). Although she prefers to get her workouts done all at once, what works for her is to break her activities into whatever chunks of time she can manage.

So then I thought that I’d get dinner on the table and run while [the kids] ate. They sat to eat and I thought, “Well, just let me get the dishes put away, and then I’ll go.” But that didn’t work, so the next thought was to put my little girls to bed and go running THEN. It was dark at that point and I’d have to go on the treadmill or the elliptical – and I hate both. But I got on the elliptical; and then the phone rang and I had to figure out something for someone. I had been on the elliptical for 5 entire minutes. […]

I’ve had a few people talk to me about successful weight loss recently, and the one thing that they keep coming back to is time. “I’d love to work out, but I don’t have the time.” Today, I did not have the time. I did it in small chunks, but I did it. 45 minutes spread out is still 45 minutes.

Do you ever feel like if you didn’t do something at the time of day you wanted to do it, then that’s it? Maybe you missed your morning run due to oversleeping, and in the evening after work you’d rather watch TV? We all have our preferences about when we’d like to be active, but if something is important to you, you’ll fit it in when you can. When I first joined a gym last summer, for months I was going regularly in the mornings to do cardio – early, before work, at least 4-5 days a week. Then I moved farther away from my gym, and it was no longer feasible to go before work because I’d have to get up ultra-early (due to having to fight my way through traffic).

So what did I do? I adapted. I still go to the gym at least three days a week to do weights, but now I’ve started running outside instead of relying on an elliptical machine. If I get home from work in the evening and don’t feel like driving across town, I can tie on my sneakers instead. Since it doesn’t require so much advance preparation, I’m more motivated to do that bit of activity before I settle in for the night.

Another example: my roommate and I were talking recently about various exercises, and I was telling her that I tend to wait and do the ab exercises I can do at home, once I get home (as opposed to doing them at the gym). When I work my abs at the gym, I use a bench, or an exercise ball, or a Captain’s chair – things I don’t personally own. But anything I can do while lying on the floor can wait until I get home.

“You mean you don’t lose your motivation once you leave the gym?” she asked. And that’s just it – I don’t. The time of day when I get my ab “floor” exercises done is usually late at night, in the last hour before I go to bed. I’ll do some pushups, I’ll work my abs (but not every night; you don’t need to do hardcore ab exercises every day – they need some time to recuperate).

Another tip for when you’re short on time? Try to get more done by increasing your intensity. Mikki calls this “density.”

The simplest way to decrease your time in the gym is to increase the “density” of your workouts. Workout density refers to the amount of work you perform in a specific period of time. One way to do this is to use supersets.

Most weight training routines involve performing a set of one exercise, resting for a minute or two and then repeating the same exercise. With this protocol, the rest between sets takes up a lot of time.

With supersets, you perform two exercises for opposing muscle groups (such as chest and back), back to back, which enables you to do more work in a shorter amount of time. So rather than rest after the first exercise, you quickly perform another set for the opposing muscle group, then rest, and repeat this sequence until you have completed all of the sets for those two exercises.

At That’s Fit, Jacki Donaldson has tips for working in fitness. Here are a few examples:

* Don’t forget the old stand-by exercises that require nothing but your trusty body. Think push-ups, sit-ups, lunges, and squats and do them wherever and whenever you get the chance.

* Strategically place a few hand weights so you can grab them when the baby is sleeping, when the boss is out to lunch, when your kids are playing quietly on their own.

(I liked her tip about the hand weights – I’m thinking about doing that one myself! My roommate has already told me she owns some hand weights of various sizes, and she keeps them in her room. Why haven’t I taken her up on her offer to share? I don’t have a good reason. I’m going to get those suckers out and leave them around so I won’t have an excuse not to use them.)

Jen at Semi-Charmed Wife wants to write a novel, and she realizes that the phrase “I don’t have the time” just isn’t true – and her advice could apply to any situation.

[O]ne of the most counter-productive things we can do is waste the precious time we have. How many hours a day do you spend watching TV? How about surfing the internet? Wandering through a shopping mall? What could you be doing with that time to move you closer to achieving your goals? […]

“I don’t have time” is a dreadful, poisonous phrase. Yes, we do. We DO have time for our dreams. Of course, many of you have responsibilities I don’t have to deal with – children or multiple jobs or caring for a parent. And honestly, I don’t know how you keep it together from day to day, let alone find time to pursue your goals. But I guarantee that if you sat down and wrote a detailed log of how you spend your day, you’d find some small amount of time – maybe 10 minutes here and 5 minutes there – that you could reclaim.

Kathryn says anyone can find the time to work out if they really want to – you just have to make it a priority.

If I think about my day and my week, the truth is I am rarely too busy. I could finish work an hour early to go for a walk and mostly it would have little effect on my deadlines. […]

The phrase “I’m too” is an excuse. It’s a way of justifying not doing something. A way of avoiding it. It’s about letting myself off the hook. And usually the phrase “I’m too busy”, actually means I’m not making exercise, meditating, or whatever else I’m avoiding, a priority. What I’m actually saying is “this isn’t important enough to me”.

Margarita, a staffer and blogger at Glamour magazine, talks about fitting exercise into her daily schedule and why it’s important.

There were many excuses I used to avoid getting to the gym but the biggest one: “There’s just no time.” The thing is there won’t ever be enough hours in the day to do everything we could, theoretically, be doing. So we prioritize: meeting deadlines at work/spending time with friends/bathing/whatever. I realized that by not exercising, I was saying “Losing weight – and loving myself – is not my priority.” While I’m still working on finding balance – being really present in my personal life, succeeding at work and taking care of my body – now I realize that every hour I’m awake is a decision: Am I willing to give up an extra 45 minutes of sleep to take a spin class in the morning? Am I willing to skip out on a party early so I’m not too exhausted to work out the next day?

The choice, lately, is YES. Yes!

Cara wrote a funny post about the decision she and her husband made to wake up early in the morning and go to the gym. But things just weren’t working in their favor…

In our carefully thought-out plan, we would get up at five ready to greet the day, then we would workout with big smiles on our faces, evidence of our love for each other practically oozing from every pore. We would kiss goodbye on the gym floor, hit the showers by 6:30, and be at our desks ready to productively face the day by 7:30. Not only would our bodies look better, but we would feel better and be more successful! Working out in the morning would solve all of our problems! We would become a power couple with toned triceps and monster paychecks! This was going to be the best thing that ever happened to us!

(end dream sequence)

How to you remain active when you don’t have enough time?

Related Reading:

Workout Mommy inspires me to move — like when she tells us how to prevent blogger’s butt (no fancy machines or gym memberships required!).

Forbes: Ten Reasons You’re a Couch Potato

That’s Fit: Break It Up

MSNBC’s Fit List: Gimme 10! Minutes, That Is. Make good use of any amount of time you have.