With kids to drop at school, business meetings, groceries to pick up, personal calls to make, a dinner party with friends, and a billion other responsibilities, how are we supposed to have the time and the motivation to work out?
If you’re already managing such a busy (and insane!) schedule, we can guarantee this will be a piece of cake, especially with our extra help!
To celebrate the upcoming International Women’s Day, we put together some simple tips and tricks for achieving your health and fitness goals, starting today!
Define your goals
Before you step out the door and start your active living journey, think about why you want to make fitness part of your life. Do you want to lose weight? Or are you concerned about maintaining your health and de-stressing while working out?
If your main goal is to shed some extra pounds, you’ll find that only a more intense and rigorous schedule – like six days of exercise a week, ideally for 50 to 60 minutes at a time – will do the job.
But if you’re looking to enjoy the healthy benefits of consistent exercise, you’ll only need to spare two and a half hours a week from your busy schedule. To stay motivated and track your progress, use an app such as Bootcamp or Ease into 5K, if you’re a big fan of running.
The earlier the better
How many times have you heard yourself saying: “I’ll do it later!”. And how many times “later” became “never”? The longer you wait in the day to work out, the more excuses you can find to put it off. The solution: become a morning person! In fact, research suggests that women who work out in the morning stick with their programs more successfully than those who don’t.
But if you’re still skipping workouts, despite all your efforts to get out of bed at 6 am, start treating your workouts as you would an important business meeting: schedule them in advance and don’t ever miss one!
Make it social
Fitness is more fun when you’ve got friends involved. In fact, according to numerous researches, working out with a partner will help you stick with your goals and stop bailing your fitness commitments.
You can even take this advice to a next level, by choosing a fitness buddy with whom you are friendly but aren’t all that close with socially. If your fitness partner is a colleague or a friend of a friend, you’re probably going to feel more of an obligation to get to your workout appointments on a regular basis.
Focus on larger muscles
If you don’t have a lot of time, you should focus your efforts on larger muscles and target every trouble zone with body-weight moves.
The most effective exercises are squats, push-ups, lunges, and plank pose. Do them back-to-back as a circuit three or four times, without taking a break. You’ll see results in no time!
All workouts count
A short workout is better than no workout at all! Even 10 or 20 minutes of exercise is worth the effort.
When you’re really pressed for time, put your creativity to the test! Take the stairs instead of the escalator, walk a couple of extra blocks at lunch or use our 7-Minute Workout app while the dinner is in the oven. These little bursts of activity can truly add up to significant calories burned each day!
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