How to Fit Exercise in Your Day

Fitting exercise into our busy lives can be a struggle. It is not about making your life fit in around exercise, but fitting exercise in your life. I often have patients say that they don’t have time to fit in, its hard to find 30 – 45 minutes a day or its not a priority right now. These problems are just opportunities in disguise.

The current recommendations from the Department of Health for Australian adults (18 – 64 years) 150 – 300 minutes (2.5 – 5 hours) of moderate intensity physical activity per week. To be active on most days, if not all days of the week. They also advise that you should be doing strengthening exercises on at least 2 days of the week. This may seem daunting, it really is not. If we break this down day to day. To achieve this all you would have to do is 22 – 43 minutes of physical activity per day. Physical activity doesn’t have to be exercise, things such as: cleaning the house, grocery shopping or vacuuming. All of these activities are physical and can add to your daily activity.

Now that we know the what, we can focus on the how. How do you fit the exercise in to your routine and busy day to day life. An easy way to start to build that routine is by attaching your exercise to something you do every day. You could do 10 – 15 minutes of exercise before you have breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. Or do it with an activity that you would do every day (Eg. Calf raises when you brush your teeth, squats while the kettle boils, push ups before you watch TV, exercise during the ad breaks etc).