How to Exercise When You Have No Time: A 3-Step Plan
Introduction
Although exercise exists in many forms, nearly all medical scientists and healthcare professionals agree that some form of exercise should be a part of everyone’s day-to-day life. Commonly cited benefits of exercise include reduced risk of disability and disease, greater longevity, and higher quality of life.
Naturally, exercise also comes with costs. The most obvious is inherent to the process itself: our time.
Up until a certain point, the benefits of exercise increase the longer we exercise. That basic relationship presents a dilemma for many of us: how should we balance our various commitments and find the time needed to exercise?
Finding a good answer is especially difficult for people with little free time.
This post aims to help people with little time create and use opportunities for exercise. It is organized around the following three-step process:
Setting realistic exercise goals
Finding opportunities to exercise
Establishing exercise-related habits
Step 1: Setting realistic exercise goals
The first step toward fitting exercise into your busy life is determining (a) how much you want to exercise and (b) which forms of exercise interest you.
As for how much to exercise, 3 to 4 hours per week is often regarded as a sustainable balance between gaining the benefits of exercise and limiting its costs (including the time spent exercising).
With few exceptions, this weekly total can be divided into as many sessions as you like. Many people find that splitting those 3 to 4 hours into 30-minute daily sessions works well, given the consistency and structure that approach offers.
There are a few reasons why seven 30-minute sessions may not work for you, however, and this is where your choice of exercise comes into play.
Simply put, some forms of exercise are easier to do in short bursts than others. For example, interval training, which alternates repeated bouts of sprinting with periods of recovery, is a relatively intense form of exercise and, therefore, well suited to brief 30-minute sessions.
By contrast, 30 minutes may be too short for a full-body resistance (weight) training workout, because too few sets and repetitions can be completed in that window. That risks leaving your muscles understimulated and, therefore, unlikely to grow and adapt.
Another factor that can influence how long and how often you work out is the set of small frictions associated with getting to the place where you exercise, changing into and out of exercise clothing, and so on.
Together, these small barriers before and after exercise effectively prolong every workout. After all, a 30-minute workout flanked by 45 minutes of transit and transition is ultimately a 75-minute time commitment.
That is why your choice of exercise should account for not only your health-related, functional, or aesthetic goals but also the practical realities of doing that exercise routinely (location, preparation, warm-up, cool-down, and so on).
In light of this, some people settle on 3 to 4 workouts a week, each lasting about an hour. Exercising on roughly half the days of the week creates a rhythm and consistency that can help sustain an exercise routine long-term, while also reducing how often you pay the frictions described above.
Although exercise sessions lasting substantially longer than 1 hour may seem like an effective way to reduce the frictions that can eat up time, your athletic performance can decline after a certain point, making workouts less impactful and recovery slower.
Beyond frequency and duration, another factor that should influence your approach is the relationship between effort and efficiency. As previously mentioned, some forms of exercise (e.g., sprinting) require a great deal of physical exertion and, as a result, can satisfy many exercise goals fairly efficiently.
Other forms of exercise, by contrast, give the exerciser much more leeway in how much effort to put in. For example, imagine a 300-pound bodybuilder and an 80-year-old grandmother working out side by side.
Technically speaking, it would require the same amount of physical work for each of them to pick up a 10-pound dumbbell off the ground and set it back down ten times.
Even so, the positive impact of that exercise on the two people would differ greatly. This is because the bodybuilder has a much higher capacity for physical work, so their body would derive little stimulation or physiological challenge from such a task, while the grandmother’s might derive a great deal.
This example illustrates the importance of committing full effort and attention to any exercise we do. Without such effort, we are unlikely to receive much return on the precious time we are investing.
Step 2: Finding opportunities to exercise
Of course, there is little point in setting goals for total weekly exercise time or for workout length and frequency if they cannot fit into the day-to-day schedule you actually live by.
When it comes to finding time to exercise, there are effectively two approaches: (1) exercise during open or flexible blocks of time in your existing schedule, or (2) modify your schedule to create new blocks of time for exercise.
Let’s first assume that you have fixed commitments that prevent you from changing your schedule much. In this case, one opportunity to work out is the transition between major obligations like work, school, and family life.
For example, if you already commute between home and work at the start and end of the day, it makes sense to add a short detour to the gym along the way.
Tacking a gym visit onto your commute makes sense not only for the sake of time efficiency but also for consistency and accountability. After all, your primary daily obligation already takes you out of the house on a routine schedule, anyway. Using that trip as an opportunity to work out is much easier than, say, making a conscious decision to leave the comfort of your bed just to exercise.
If you do have the ability to rework your schedule to create opportunities for exercise, that freedom introduces several key decisions. The first is the time of day at which you would like to work out. We will consider three main time slots: morning, midday, and evening.
One benefit of working out earlier in the day is that morning exertion can help establish your sleep-wake rhythm, making it easier to go to bed and wake up when you want to. Completing your workout early can also give you a sense of accomplishment that you can build on throughout the day.
Alternatively, one benefit of working out during the mid-day is that such exercise can serve as a nice break within or between the core activities of your day; after all, it can be quite understimulating to be focused on a limited set of topics or tasks for several hours at a time.
Lastly, working out later in the day can serve as a psychological boundary between your core day-to-day obligations and your personal time. Exercising once your major responsibilities have ended may help you transition out of the “modes” you enter and “faces” you wear during those relatively stressful activities.
Whether or not you can adjust your schedule to accommodate exercise, everyone must decide how to approach weekdays and weekends (or whichever days you have the fewest obligations).
On the one hand, working out on weekdays lets you build on the structure of your daily commitments (as previously mentioned). The downside is that time devoted to exercise takes up a relatively large proportion of the free time available to you on those days.
Conversely, one advantage of working out on your days off is that the time a workout takes is relatively small compared to the amount of free time you have. Days off can even open the door to longer or more strenuous exercise, given the extra time for rest and recovery that follows.
However, exercising on days off can feel a little odd to some people because they associate those days with total relaxation and leisure. That is one reason it is important to try various schedules and see what works best for you.
Step 3: Establishing exercise-related habits
Naturally, a plan means nothing without execution. Once you have settled on a weekly exercise plan, it is worth considering a few key factors that can help you actually put it into practice.
The first thing to consider is that complex, multifaceted habits take root not all at once but piece by piece. Starting small and building consistency is often much more manageable than attempting a full implementation from day one.
For example, your ideal exercise plan might involve working out at a series of specific times and days throughout the week. Even so, it would make more sense to first build consistency, and a sense of achievement, with just one of the workout sessions (perhaps the most convenient one).
Once you have established a rhythm with that session, you can use the momentum and sense of accomplishment you have earned to slowly increase the number of sessions or their difficulty. This approach illustrates the “virtuous cycle” of habit formation that starting small sets in motion.
Another thing you should consider when establishing an exercise habit is, whenever possible, integrating that habit into your existing routines. This applies not just to day-to-day obligations like work or school that routinely get you out of the house, but also to the leisure activities you already engage in.
For example, music lovers and news junkies should be happy to hear that many forms of exercise can be done while listening to music or podcasts. Fashion lovers can also enjoy the forms of self-expression that are possible with a thoughtful choice of exercise clothing.
Furthermore, converting routine social time with friends and family into opportunities for exercise can pay dividends. For instance, a get-together that would normally take place at a restaurant or café could be turned into a gym session you do together.
The camaraderie you share with an exercise partner can also provide social accountability and encouragement, making it easier to establish and follow your exercise routine.
Additionally, making small instances of exercise a part of your day-to-day life can reinforce the habits you would like to form through longer, dedicated workout sessions.
For example, replacing short car and elevator rides with walking and climbing the stairs aligns small, day-to-day actions with a pro-exercise value system. Over time, this kind of holistic commitment to exercise can naturally increase the motivation you feel toward all forms of exercise.
A final factor to consider when implementing your exercise plan is that deviations from the plan are inevitable. That is why it is important to build some flexibility into your plan.
One useful way to build in flexibility is to establish several candidate days on which you could work out and commit to working out on a minimum number of them. For example, you might commit to working out on at least two days out of a set of three. Such flexibility allows you to make game-day decisions when life gets busy or you do not feel your best.
Another option is to designate certain days of the week as make-up days for sessions that are missed for one reason or another. Weekends and other days off are often good candidates for this approach, given the relatively large amount of free time you have on those days.
The benefit of flexibility in your routine is not limited to helping you achieve the goals of the plan itself. It also builds the self-forgiveness needed to offset the sting that can arise from tracking your progress and adherence (which you should also be doing).
Wellness Takeaways
Even if you are busy, the numerous benefits of exercise for physical and mental health make it worth finding the time. If you are trying to build an exercise routine, follow the three-step process below:
Determine your exercise goals
Decide how much you would like to exercise per week and which types of exercise you would like to do. Then divide the weekly total into sessions long enough to meaningfully complete the exercises you have chosen.
Feel free to make some sessions shorter or longer depending on recovery, energy levels, and the free time you have that day. Give full effort during each session so that the time you spend working out actually pays off.
Figure out an ideal schedule
Figure out the times of day and days of the week during which you can exercise, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each day or time slot.
Minimize frictions such as getting to the gym, warming up, and cooling down by fitting exercise around day-to-day obligations that already motivate you or get you out of the house.
Build exercise-related habits
Your ideal schedule may involve a detailed mixture of workouts on different days and times, but start small by building consistency and a sense of achievement one session at a time.
Also, weave exercise into your existing routines (e.g., social time and hobbies) and add small acts of movement, such as taking the stairs, to increase your awareness of and motivation for exercise in general.
Be sure to build some flexibility into your plan so that you can deal with life’s unpredictability without feeling shame or disappointment.
Thank you for your time and attention!
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