Health experts advocate working out for about 30 minutes to 60 minutes a day to benefit from your fitness program. However, if you are the workaholic type, you probably don’t have the luxury to spend 30 minutes to a full hour a day exclusively for workouts.
Keep Your Eyes Open
Exercising is always possible provided you just squeeze it into your schedules in a more resourceful manner. Get off your couch and start moving around, advises fitness guru Ann Grandjean. Every bit of chore inside your house is an opportunity to get fit. The trick is to get yourself moving - clear out the attic, do some gardening, walk to the grocery store. Any activity that expends energy also burns up calories.
Use Your Time Wisely
A couple of 10-minute windows in your day may not seem like enough time to get a good workout, but a recently conducted study suggests differently. It determined that men and women who took 10-minute walks or engaged in other exercise for a similar amount of time had a higher probability of exercising regularly. Also, they lost more weight on the whole than participants who worked out in 1-hour intervals.
What other experts say
Exercise physiologist Glenn Gaesser’s recent study conducted in Virginia involved men and women who exercised for 10 minutes at a time. The startling results showed that these men and women were able to dramatically improve their overall health by conducting 15 of these 10-minute sessions per week for one month. At the end of that time, Gaesser found his subjects as fit as men and women who were 20 years younger.
Splitting exercise into smaller blocks during your busy days can build your confidence, says time management consultant Harold Taylor. Missing out on regular gym sessions shoots down your momentum and motivation. You may surmise that fitness training isn’t worth pursuing anymore because you just don’t have the time for it. However, if you can manage to squeeze in some exercise opportunity any way you find it, however small it is, it somehow encourages you to hang in there and stay on.
Not a replacement
Small workout sessions are great solutions for busy workdays and lagging enthusiasm, but they shouldn’t replace your regular routine. If you are continuously time-challenged and don’t anticipate being able to frequent the gym anytime in the near future, there are other ways to work a real exercise program into your day. You don’t have to do them all, just pick the best ones for your situation and stick to it.
* When you pick up the morning paper, take a quick 5-minute walk up the street and back again.
* When you find yourself at home for the day, use the Stairmaster or treadmill to get to work up a sweat.
* Jump rope or do jumping jacks. This burns as much as 90 calories in 10 minutes.
* Practice upright push-ups in between household chores by pushing in and out from the shoulder.
* Play games with your kids during the afternoon. Kickball and croquet are good for younger children. Older kids will enjoy playing football or other sports.
* Before retiring or after applying your facial cream at night, do several reps of some dumbbell exercises. This is recommended by exercise instructor Sheila Cluff, owner of The Palms in Palm Springs, CA. She keeps a set of weights right in front of her bathroom sink.
* Take your kid to baseball practice and walk around the field while you wait.
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