Fitness Obstacle: Time May 4, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
If you have a family, run a business, or have other important commitments, it’s hard to find regular time in your schedule to devote to exercise.
I have three daughters, aged 3, 2 and 8 months (hereafter named G, S and H respectively). Any parent will understand the workload that involves, and the difficulty I have finding time for any kind of regular exercise. In addition to that, my eldest daughter has Down syndrome, so she develops slower than the others and needs additional care and attention.
Besides our families, most of us have a bunch of other commitments and responsibilities. We need to earn a living (either at a job or running our own business), we’re involved in community service or charity work, and we have hobbies and pasttimes. In addition to my day job as an engineer, I’m a keen photographer, I’m the librarian and webmaster for my local camera club, I’m the webmaster for my state Down Syndrome Association, I’m an occasional weekend wedding photographer, and I run several other web sites.
My typical weekday goes something like this:
- 6:00am – wake up, get G up and dressed, get ready for work
- 7:00am – leave for work
- 7:30am – working
- 12:00pm – lunch
- 12:30pm – working
- 4:00pm – leave work
- 4:30pm – family time, dinner, getting girls fed/bathed/to bed
- 7:30pm – cleaning up after dinner, housework
- 8:00pm – watch TV/DVDs, do stuff online, dabble with digital photos/video, etc
- 11:00pm – bed
I just couldn’t seem to fit regular exercise into that routine, despite a few attempts. I thought of all my options, and couldn’t see any that would work:
- Before work: Getting up at 6:00am is already very early, and I’m tired enough as it is.
- During my lunch break: I only have a half-hour lunch break, so I can’t fit in changing clothes, exercising, showering and changing back into work clothes, and getting something to eat in that time-slot.
- After work: I need to get home to help with the girls’ night-time routine. I also don’t want to sacrifice family time, since I get precious little of it as it is.
- At night: After a long day at work, the last thing I feel like doing is going out in the dark for some exercise. Including showering afterwards, any form of exercise would take at least an hour out of my evening, leaving even less time for relaxation, time with my wife, and all my extra-curricular activities (which I’m already behind on!).
Most people have similar difficulty finding a regular timeslot for exercise in their daily or weekly routine. It seems impossible without sacrificing some other aspect of your life.
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- Posted in : Fitness Obstacles
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Comments»
That’s all very true. I know that the “Fitness Obstacles” articles are soon to be answered by solutions, so I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. But since well all tend to fill our days to the brim, adding any new activity by necessity means giving up time in other activities. The only question we have to ask ourselves is what our priorities are. We can’t have it all, only what we want the most.
True. Although, I’ve found that with a little creative thinking you can sometimes reorganise your routine to fit exercise in without impacting other stuff too much. You do need some discipline to make it all work, though!