How to manage your workouts when life seems like it constantly gets in the way.
Life can get busy. As a business owner, I can attest to this – sometimes it feels like there’s not enough hours in the day. As such, taking care of yourself and your fitness can be hard to prioritize. So today, we’ve come up with some easy tricks you can implement into your daily routine to make staying on track much easier.
- Schedule your workouts and prep time – Just the same as you would schedule a meeting or doctor’s appointment into your calendar, do the same with your workouts and meal prep. This is actually one of the great reasons why hiring a personal trainer can be so beneficial to adherence – you now have 1-5 blocks per week where you have exactly 0 excuses as to why you shouldn’t be at the gym kicking butt! Even if you don’t have a trainer, the same concept applies.
- Bulk Prep – you know what they say: if you fail to plan, you plan to fail! One easy way to plan for diet through a busy work week is to set aside a couple hours every Sunday (or whatever other day you have off during the week) to plan out your week’s menu, grocery shop for all the necessary ingredients. Then, bulk prep any ingredients that you know you’ll be using a lot (and that won’t spoil). Some easy ones for bulk prep are: a pot of rice, chopping all your vegetables for easy access, marinating your meats, and cooking your meats a few days in advance. Frozen veggies are also a great staple for convenience if you find yourself short on your 8-10 servings per day.
- Invest in Tupperware Containers – Building on our previous 2 points, Tupperware containers can be a great tool for staying ready because you can bulk prep and then portion out food so that you have grab and go lunches, for example. Stir fry lunches anyone?
- Myo Reps and Supersets – Not everything is about planning ahead, per se. Sometimes it can be about having the right tools in your arsenal for when a busy day comes out of nowhere and suddenly you only have 45 minutes to hit the gym instead of 1.5 hours. Myo reps are a very effective solution for hypertrophy while still being fast. Just do your first set of 8-12 reps with a weight that leaves you 1 rep in the tank. From there, you take 5 breaths, then repeat the weight for as many reps as possible while still leaving one in the tank. 5 more breaths, and repeat that cycle until you can no longer get 3 reps with 1 in the tank. This option seldom takes more than 5 minutes per exercise.
Supersets can also be a viable option if you aren’t extremely short on time. One of the most popular ways to perform a superset (doing 2 exercises back to back) is to do exercises that train opposing muscle groups. For example, you could start with a dumbbell bench press (upper body pushing muscles), then go right into a dumbbell row (upper body pulling muscles). From there, you would take 30-60 seconds of rest, and repeat the superset until you did the required number of sets in your workout routine.
As you can see, one of the major themes with fitness success is planning. Scheduling, preparing your kitchen, and meal prepping are all great building blocks to goal achievement. Planning for the unexpected is also necessary – for days when you only have time for a 30 minute workout. Have any tips that you find helpful but didn’t see mentioned in this article? Email them to us or post to our Facebook page!
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