Time isn’t just the name of my favorite Pink Floyd song. It’s not just a digital number changing digits on our phones when look to see where we are in our day. The interactions, significant emotional events, and energy spent on the various experiences in our lives are what fill these brackets separated by seconds, minutes, hours, sunsets, and sunrises. Every human has twenty-four hours allotted to us in a day’s worth of numerically counted time. Events we choose to spend our time on creates what we want to achieve. It could be to better ourselves in our professions, interacting with our loved ones and friends, or simply taking time for ourselves to shut off the mind and relax.
Exercise isn’t usually identified as the top of the food chain when focusing on the time we have allotted in our everyday lives. It may not be blatantly apparent but allocating minimal time to exercise significantly increases the efficiency and effectiveness of how we spend our time in our jobs, relationships, and for our own psychological, mental, and emotional well-being.
The benefit of an adherent exercise regimen isn’t the hottest news off the press. The benefits don’t seem as important as what occurs during the bulk of our day. Our professions, romantic relationships, being a student, or being a parent are the pillars that are getting most of our attention. However, a strong body equals a strong mind. The results of exercise deliver a potent rationale to better us as individuals to support the people around us we care about. Owning a physically and mentally strong presence demonstrates a profound sense of confidence, exuberance, and safety. The people we are associated with in our professions and interpersonal relationships need a steady rock to support them. Therefore, having a resilient and composed body, mind, and spirit gives the aspects of our lives we work so hard for, something to lean on. In some cases, the people around us may even want to change their methods to be strong as well by practicing tactics to improve their lifetime fitness journey.
A doctor’s visit can swiftly reveal the need for exercise. Losing weight, recalibrating blood pressure, or decreasing pain in joints is at the top of the list during a doctor’s visit. The normal prescription for exercises is seventy-five minutes of vigorous exercises per week. Get your exercise tracking log out, you’re going to need it. A request to track exercise works for some people. On the flip side, tracking more statistics and data can drive a person bonkers. Numbers, variables, and statistics can easily overwhelm a grown adult as similar to a high school geometry teacher demonstrating the beauty of the quadratic equation during a two o’clock high school sixth period class. If this is the case, don’t track variables. Go for the simple low hanging fruit. Start off by performing something that can be consistently done each day that doesn’t equate to the mental fortitude required to repeat a trigonometry algorithm. Simply focusing on three exercise techniques performed only once per day offers significant improvements to the mind and body. It doesn’t take too much time either.
Attainable examples of exercises we request our personal training clients to perform at home include planks, squats, and pushups. We encourage performing a straight arm plank for thirty seconds, ten pushups, and ten squats every day. These exercises aren’t demanding you to climb up an extra telephone pole, make fifty phone calls, or answer thirty more emails. Performing the requested exercises of a plank, a set of squats, and pushups each day throughout a week takes less time than it does to watch an inning of the Giants game. Performing the straight arm plank for thirty seconds, once a day, for seven days takes three and a half minutes out of the entire week. Additionally, seventy pushups and seventy squats throughout the week equates to one hundred and forty exercise movements throughout the week. Those numbers are substantial when looking at the perspective of additional exercise completed throughout the week. These additional mechanisms of productive stress to large muscle groups and joints of the body might not be used regularly throughout the day. Therefore, areas of the body that aren’t normally stimulated are the ones that need the most work. Performing simple yet effective exercises in small doses over a week’s time frame nurtures the body and mind in ways that support our everyday life by increasing our strength, decreasing the likely hood of getting injured, and decreasing nagging pain.
Constraints of hours in our demanding schedule is an eternal balancing act. Don’t the let the idea of “I don’t have enough time” hold you back from much needed exercise. Appreciate the simple forms of exercise. Look through the lens of what small amounts of exercise can offer your life.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
