You Have To Make Time for Exercising

Time for a hard truth – if you want to make a change, you need to put in some sacrifice. This also holds true for health and fitness. If it was that easy and effortless to drop excess kilos, many people will be doing it. The reason why it takes such a long time and determination is because it requires effort, hard work, and patience.

A certified personal trainer and editor of a popular fitness site said that he has heard every excuse in the book when it comes to why people don’t exercise. However, the one that takes the, pardon-my-pun, “fitness cake” is lack of time. Easy excuse, isn’t it? Want to make a change but have no time to devote to it. What an Einstein!

I recall the time when I was running through the market research phase of the Granite Fitness product range. A day doesn’t go by without one of my clients saying that they simply don’t have time for exercise. Well, this isn’t really valid. People who want to lose weight badly enough will make sacrifices that can be as extreme as restricting their diets, exercising rigorously for an hour a day and even keeping off alcohol.

Of course, those who gave such excuses were kicked out of our pilot programme! That brings me to another point. People shy away from exercise because they think they’ll have to spend hours in a gym. To maintain good health all you need is a healthy diet and a daily walk that can be broken up into increments throughout the day.

The first point – substitution. Find something you are doing that is not meaningful, and then replace that with exercise. Instead of watching useless re-runs on TV, why not go for a walk? If it’s a new episode that you simply can’t miss, jump rope during commercials or run on the spot. Surely that is not too hard, right?

What if you have to bring the kids to their team sports? Don’t just spend that time sitting around doing nothing. Take some inspiration from Jr. and stay on your feet during the game. Or you could walk around while watching the game. Surely you can do this, right? Killing two birds with one stone!

Next, let’s talk about social events. It is ever so simple to organise a heavy brunch with your friends, isn’t it? Well, try and substitute in a walk instead. You’ll still get to spend quality time while enjoying nature, provided the weather plays ball. You might think that walking does not burn many calories, but believe you me, over time it does make a difference.

On to the next essential chore – grocery shopping. Unless you live very far, you don’t really need to take your car, do you? In my case, I’m lucky to live a few hundred metres away from one. So I just plan it well and walk. That’s a free half-workout for me! Not applicable to you? Well, then at least park your car a little further away, and sneak a minor workout in.

Now we come to another gripe our constant complaint about how slow my apartment elevator is. I can rant about it for minutes, especially about how people would hog it. From time to time, I would elect to take the faster route – the stairs. It was, in fact, my new years’ resolution a few years ago, and I stuck to it for that year!

So there we go – small changes that you can make to your life that burns calories. But wait, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You should also schedule in proper exercise. That means sessions that will challenge you and burn substantial calories. I’m so passionate about it that I wrote a whole book on the topic – the Lifelong Fitness Blueprint. And just to make sure other areas of your life does not interfere, get it as part of the Granite Fitness Masterclass set today!

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