Engaging in exercise can be difficult for a lot of people, as we often find ourselves without the time or motivation to keep up our physical exercise for longer than 6 months. According to research it has been found that even as many as 50% of people who have started an exercise program will have dropped out after 6 months (Dishman, 2011; Weinberg & Gould, 2003) and even as early as 3 months into an exercise program participation decreases. The main problem for this rate of dropout in exercise is due to the many number of excuses we manage to create for ourselves before exercise. These can include anything from our age, gender, marital status, or even lack of social support. However, the most common excuse found for lack of exercise is due to “work reasons”.

Something many, many people find difficult to do is managing to fit exercise around an already heavy schedule of work. Do we exercise beforehand? Well, this can bring about common excuses to disregard exercise such as: “it’s too early”, “I’m losing out on sleep, which affects my work” and “I can exercise after work”. I’m sure many people, myself included, have been a victim of that last excuse, where we convince ourselves into thinking we absolutely will exercise after the working day is over. But what follows then is one of the most common excuses for not exercising. “I’m too tired to exercise because of work”.

The main issue many of us face in our day-to-day lives is managing our time to include exercise regularly. The important thing to remember is that exercise is not specifically defined as running 3 miles or going swimming for an hour. It’s important to start slow and build up to something you’re comfortable with and make it personal to you. Inheriting another person’s exercise plan can easily lead to another case of dropout from regular exercise. Below we shall start work through a template of managing time more effectively to include exercise around your day-to-day life.

Exercise Management

Managing to introduce exercise into your daily life can seem difficult and may look to take up time you may feel you need to rest. Effective management of your time comes from efficient planning. A football player will spend days, even weeks preparing for games to make sure they are at their best for the game. Managing your exercise habits is no different, and effective planning provides us with much more time than we thought possible, whilst also removing any possible excuse for not exercising. Here’s a brief example of effective exercise management:

• It’s Monday evening and you’re preparing for work on Tuesday. You finish work at 6PM on Tuesday.

• Breaking your day down will provide you with a deeper insight into where you have the most time and where the possibilities are for engaging in regular exercise. I.e. possibly cycling/walking/running to and from work, taking a walk on your lunch break, going for a short run in the time between getting home and taking time to relax.

• By simply breaking the day down into the time spent away from work, 3 opportunities have arisen to engage in regular exercise. The major point would be changing the method of travel to/from work. This provides us with little opportunity to create an excuse to not exercise, whilst providing us with the satisfaction that we’ve exercised before and after work.

The above example is a brief insight into how breaking down your day provides us with a greater opportunity to engage in regular exercise. (REMEMBER: Exercise can be anything from taking a brisk walk for 20 minutes right up to competing in a marathon).

Key Points:

• Manage your time effectively and look for the opportunities to participate in physical exercise.

• Be aware of the excuses you are giving yourself. Are they really valid excuses or is it just our brains tricking us into not exercising?

• Exercise varies in intensity and time. Start at your own pace and make your exercise plans personal to your own goals and abilities.

• Increase exercise intensity and time as you start to progress and improve.

Thomas Buck (Research Assistant, Rescon)