Fitness Tips to Get More Exercise in Your Schedule

If you work full time and have family and other responsibilities, there’s not much time left to take care of you. Fitness is important, though, so read on for some tips about getting more fitness into your busy schedule.

Fitness Tip 1: Think Small.

You don’t need to exercise for thirty minutes or more to achieve the maximum results. Recent studies have shown that short increments of exercise throughout the day produce the same effect as one longer workout. Plan your day to accommodate several ten-minute exercise routines. Fit in three of those workouts and you have a total of thirty minutes for the day.

Fitness Tip 2: Equip Yourself.

When you have exercise equipment at the office and ready to use, you are much more likely to take a few minutes to work out. If something such as a treadmill is not practical in your office, plenty of smaller workout tools can challenge and strengthen your muscles.

Resistance bands come in a variety of tensions so you can choose the best level of resistance for your needs. These bands are practically weightless, take up less room than your briefcase, and can be used for upper body exercise, stretching, leg training, and more.

Also consider a small, inexpensive set of dumbbells, ranging in weight from three to ten pounds. Most come with a small storage rack that keeps the weights safely out of the way. Dumbbells are used primarily for upper body workouts, but many exercises use dumbbells and call on the lower body muscles at the same time.

You may also want to consider buying a yoga mat to keep at the office. A mat can do triple duty for yoga, stretching routines, and Pilates exercises.

Fitness Tip 3: Make Your Health a Priority

Although juggling a career, family, and more is highly demanding and doesn’t often leave much time for self care, in the long run neglecting exercise damages both your physical and emotional health (and by extension the lives of people close to you). By neglecting your needs, you send your body and psyche the message that you are not as important as other things. Ignore your body too long and you may find yourself with serious health issues that could have been avoided simply with some preventative self care.

Realize that caring for your body is a priority and needs to be treated with as much importance as the other concerns in your life. Schedule exercise time into your planner and treat it like an important business meeting. You only have one body to last your entire lifetime.