Getting your workout done without failure
Getting your exercise done for the day without failure is not only habit supporting your goal of losing weight permanently, but it is incredibly beneficial for your overall health. As the common saying you probably already heard goes: if you could pack the health benefits of regular exercise into one pill, it would be the best selling pill in the entire world. And people are desperately looking for a pill like this, since they have a lot of health problems.
The reality is that, it is impossible to pack benefits of exercise into one pill. That leaves us all, no matter how skinny or overweight, successful or less successful, rich or poor to have to get our regular exercise done if we want to stay healthy and lean.
Like I wrote before, if you are slightly overweight, and you have up to 20 extra pounds you could shed to get to your ideal healthy weight and you are physically active regularly, and those extra 20 pounds don’t bother you, than don’t stress about it. You are most likely very healthy and active person that works out on regular basis. You don’t have to stress about your weight. And you are probably also very attractive too.
I know women that are slightly overweight, they are incredibly active and at the same time they are attractive. Anyway, I just wanted to point to the importance of regular exercise for your health first. And little love handles don’t have to mean compromising on your attractiveness.
And of course physical exercise is important in losing weight permanently. With regular exercise, you build muscle, you increase your metabolism. And with combination of good diet, you loose weight faster and keep it off permanently.
So now, when you know how important regular exercise is for your health, body weight, self confidence, how do you make yourself to do it on regular basis?
Start with walking
The simplest way to introduce more physical activity to your life is to start walking regularly. If you are very sedentary person, this simple habit of walking every day for 20 minutes can have a huge impact on your body weight, overall health, and energy level. Walking is primal and very safe activity. It is available to anyone, at anytime and you can do it anywhere you wish to. Walking actually might be the healthiest and the most natural activity for us human beings. Along with some occasional interval sprinting, it can also become a great performance developing workout. Don’t start sprinting just yet to avoid injuries, especially if you haven’t been active lately. Start with regular walking first.
Developing the walking habit
I know you want it. I know you realize how important it is for you. I know how bad you feel about yourself if you don’t do it. And you still don’t do it. It’s hard. It is personal time sacrifice. You would rather do something else. That’s all understandable. Your other habits are so ingrained, that finding time and forcing yourself to walk for 20 minutes per day seems like impossible task.
But I have solution for you. Don’t wait to do your 20 minute walk until you get home. Ok, sometimes you will have to do it after your day is over and everything is done. Than instead of you watching your favorite show in TV, you have to go for a walk.
What if you don’t want to sacrifice your evenings? You don’t have to! I will show you how you can fit your 20 minute walk into your day and you won’t even recognize the time sacrifice.
Chunk it
You have certain morning routine. You get up, get the kids ready for school, drive them to the school, than maybe you stop in your favorite coffee shop on the way to work.
Now imagine this: You drop your kids at school. You drive to the shopping centre to get a coffee. Now instead of getting the coffee right away, spend 5-7 minutes walking around the grocery store before you get your coffee. Time it! Get your coffee, sit in the car and record it. Now when you arrive to your works parking lot, walk another 5-7 minutes before you go to work, holding your sugar free coffee and siping from it. Go ahead and, record it! Go to work.
Now look at your paper where you recorded your active walking time. Now it says that you already walked for 12 minutes and the day just started. Now let’s say, you want to take a little break from work at 10:30 AM and go to the corner store to buy a piece of fruit. Most companies don’t mind employees to take little brakes here and there throughout their working day. Now instead of going straight to the corner store, you choose the longer route. You circle around the block and around another block. Than you get your apple and return to work. Now you will add another 5 minutes to your sheet of exercise for the day.
You already build 17 minutes of active walking in your day. The matter of finishing last 3 minutes and possibly add extra time to your day of walking is just to do some extra walking on your lunch brake, after the work when you stop grocery shopping, or before you pick up your kids from the school.
You can get creative here and add extra walking anytime whenever you can. This way, you not only get your walking exercise done for the day, you will use your time better. You can always utilize the little time windows for your exercise. Chunking is totally fine.
The misleading picture many people have ingrained in their heads about exercise is that it needs to be scheduled and you need to mentally focus on it. I used to be like that. Nothing is further from truth. Exercise doesn’t have to start with changing clothes, putting on the athletic shoes, meditating before and end with the cool down and cold shower. Who has time for that?
Chunking works
The way to make chunking your exercise work for you, in this case walking in your day is to keep it in mind or keep it written on paper. Write, what you want to accomplish for that day exercise wise. In this case it’s 20 minutes of walking. And than, when the opportunity comes, like the little time you have before grocery shopping, you do it! You complete your little chunk of walking for 5 minutes. And you add it up.
You’ll build over time a certain mindset, that exercise can be done in little chunks over the day. The result of this kind of mind set will be less failure to exercise, making you feel better about yourself, you add extra activity into your day, you will still have your evenings free if you choose to and you will be on your way to get into a habit of moving/exercising regularly. Quite a powerful habit to develop. It’s life changing!
Work out while you are working
The best way to get your exercise done is when you work. Not everybody is lucky to have this option, but if you do, take it! It doesn’t really have to be a full gym provided by employer. Possible brakes and atmosphere at the workplace, when nobody is always looking over your shoulder what you are doing is great. You can do a lot in these breaks for yourself.
I am not promoting any non working activities here while you are on the clock. No, you should concentrate on your job and do whatever you can to do for the company you work for. They are paying you after all. But, a company that doesn’t allow their employees to have active brakes, long active brakes and closely watches them to be more productive and squeezing the employees to the maximum is not a good company to work for. And you should quit as soon as you can if this describes your employer.
You say, it’s bad economy! I am lucky to have a job. That’s pile of steaming horse shit! And your boss knows it. They need you. You are the one that makes them rich! Every employer needs to realize, and lots of them do, that active brakes improve productivity and loyalty of employees. Active brakes create healthier, stronger, more creative employees. Every company should have a certain fitness program or at least long active brakes for they employees.
I personally would always get my workout done at work. And this applies to the times that I didn’t work in health club as a personal trainer. I used to work for a small architectural firm, where I would get my 5 sets of push ups, pull ups and squat jumps done every second day. Than I would stretch a lot in my brakes. Yes, I would still go to the gym in the afternoon to lift some heavy weights, or run on racetrack or play some tennis. But, even if I didn’t, huge part of my workout was already done. And I want the same for you. It’s really possible to pull this off with some focus and planing.
I will give you few tips, how you can get your workout done at work, so in the afternoon, you don’t have to run to the gym drained from energy.
Examples of work workouts
Climb stairs at work. If you work in a building that has several floors, the building has certainly nice long staircase. It’s probably hidden somewhere in the back of the building and nobody knows about it. Because everybody is of course using elevator.
Now let’s say you work on the second floor in 4 flights tall building. Come to work and take elevator to your floor. Sit at the desk and write down what you are going to accomplish. If you are a beginner and just starting write down 3×4 floors. That means you will climb that staircase 3 times today all the way to the 4th floor.
Now you do some work, and in half an hour, good opportunity for a 10 minute breaks arrives. Instead or checking the Oprah website, stand up from your desk. Go straight to the staircase and step down to the ground floor. As soon as you come down, start climbing up. You don’t have to go fast. Just get to the 4th floor and than step down back to the 2nd floor back to your workstation. And get back to the work. If you did this, you are most likely feeling great, blood is flowing intensively in you veins. You are completely awake.
After you did your first climb of stairs wait for the next opportunity to do your second and third climb. This way, your workout will be done. Your workout will be done with your work together. You most likely felt great at work and got more work done at the same time. You leave work, you don’t have to go to the gym, or do any other exercise anymore. You are done with your exercise for the day. You can enjoy your evening however you like. No need to go to a stinky, dusty, boring gym.
Use every opportunity to move
If your work doesn’t give you much room for active brakes and you are stuck at your desk, use every opportunity to move. Can you stand at your desk? Call your company IT to get you the longer cables or to set up your work station standing freely. Do some squats and whenever you have a minute, walk intensively around the office. Use every opportunity to move.
Even the busiest job positions out there have little windows, that can be used for some physical movement.
Long walks
Can you eat your lunch or part of it before or after your lunch brake? Than do it! And use your lunch brake for a long walk. Eating a piece of chicken breast with some apple doesn’t take that long and you can have some of it before your lunch brake starts. The key here is planing and preparation. But if you plan well, you can use your lunch brake as your work out brake. Just because it says lunch brake, it doesn’t mean, you have to sit with your coworkers in office cafeteria, nearby restaurant or fast food joint. Lunch brake in my world means move a lot brake.
Strength training at work
If you are not one of the lucky ones to whom employer provides fitness centre on the job site, don’t despair. You can always bring pair of free weights to your work too. You don’t really need the whole fitness center. While for beginner exercisers, the best choice is to start with walking, if they have more time and will, they can introduce some light weight training too. Just few simple exercises are fine to add to your mainly walking routine. Also, here you can utilize short brakes at work to perform a set of exercise.
You will not sweat, don’t worry. And it shouldn’t feel too hard. The benefit to you and your employer will be: your overall energy level increases, better productivity, more movement in your day, increased metabolism and permanent weight loss. So if you are interested in doing some strength training exercises at work or at homes office, check my office workouts.
Physical chores
Any kind of extra physical chore you do in your day will help you lose weight permanently. It burns calories, increases metabolism and it is great for your health. Activities like gardening, cleaning, grocery shopping, sweeping, lawn moving, wood pecking and many others are great additional physical movements in your day. I said additional. What do I mean by that? I simply mean, that you shouldn’t substitute these activities for your scheduled 20 minutes walking every day. You need to always get your walking for the day done. What you do extra will be great, but don’t skip your walking. Even if you spent the whole day gardening. Stick to your walking schedule!
Stay positive
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Losing weight permanently is not easy. Don’t get down on yourself if for some reason you skip your walking routine and eat bad food. We, all human beings are a work in progress. Non of us is perfect. We make mistakes every day and we make bad choices every day. That’s here to stay. You are not an exception. The important thing is, that you are sticking with it and not quitting. And you want to improve every day. In these case, changing your habits over long term and eventually achieving your desired body weight.
If you over time keep changing your habits and doing little progress you will get to your desired destination sooner or later. Just imagine a wood pecker. He needs to do hundreds or thousands of axe peck to bring the large tree down. With each peck, he is getting closer to having that tree down and sooner or later, if he didn’t quit, the tree will certainly be down. Even if he did only 3 peck per day, the tree will be cut within a year. Thing about your permanent weight loss exactly the same way.
A year has 365 days and you only need to improve just a little bit every day to see a huge improvement over the year. So, the most important is to keep pecking and not quitting.
This is actually the secret of all successful people. They just know, that they are not going to improve in one week or month, whatever they do. So if they don’t see much of the change in their improvement they don’t stress about it. They keep going. And eventually the big change arrives.
I want you too, to instill this kind of mentality into your head and use it in your own quest to lose weight permanently. Strive to improve just a little bit every day. Do few simple action steps. Do your best and than don’t worry about the rest. Relax. Stay positive. Give yourself a credit. Reward yourself with some dark chocolate. Tomorrow is another day. Losing weight permanently is not easy, but is as simple as that.
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>>How to lose weight permanently – part 1
>>How to lose weight permanently – part 2
>>How to lose weight permanently – part 3