5 Ways To Squeeze A Workout Into A Jam Packed Day

All home gym junkies start out with the thought that the convenience of working out from home will help them squeeze their workouts into even the busiest days. Unfortunately, even with the benefits of having a home gym, life can still get in the way of a consistent training routine.

Being the fitness fanatic that you are or that you’re striving to be, you simply can’t let this happen. You have to make your workouts part of your day, regardless of what you need to do to squeeze them in. Here are just a few tips to help you fit your workouts in no matter what your schedule looks like.

1. Trim the Fat

If you feel like you’re constantly missing workouts because of your hectic schedule, take a minute to look at how you’re spending your time. See if there are any tasks that can be combined or, even better, delegated.

Look at the chores that you need to accomplish during the week…can any of them be moved to the weekend? If so, that may free up a little more workout time.

Finally, look at any time that you’d consider “wasted minutes” during your day. If you find that you have 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there of free time, you may be able to use that to squeeze in your training; which bring me to my next tip…

2. Break it Down

If your schedule is so packed that there’s nothing you can do to free up 30 minutes to an hour a day for training, you may need to break your workouts down into mini-workouts throughout the day.

This concept is similar to that of taking a smoke break, only instead of breaking to diminish your health by smoking, you can break to improve your health by doing a 5 or 10 minute circuit.

Go outside or to an open area and do push-ups, squats, walking lunges or even crunches if you have a place to do them. You can apply any unweighted exercise you want to this circuit – heck, if you have some light weights hiding under your desk at work, you can even do weighted exercises. The point is to just do something.

By the end of the day you’ll have done a minimum of 20 minutes of working out.

3. Adjust Your Training Plan

If none of the above tip work, you may want to consider revising you fitness program to meet the demands of your schedule. If you presently workout 5 days a week, maybe you could shift your training split to workout 3 days a week. Maybe do upper body training on Saturday and lower body training on Sunday and focus on cardio a couple of days during the week, for Cardiovascular workouts you can pick home rowing machine, it will help you to burn calories faster than you expect.

You just need to look at your training plan and look at your schedule and make you training plan an integral part of your schedule, much like going to work every day is.

4. Invest in Resistance Bands

I say this only because resistance bands can give you a pretty good workout and they’re portable. They don’t take the place of weight training, but they can certainly augment it. So, if you have a good program down and you travel frequently or you have some days that are harder to schedule dedicated workout time; instead of skipping your workout altogether, do a short workout with resistance bands.

5. Get Your Office On Board

Another great idea that will help others as much as it will help you is to talk to your office about approving a thirty minute fitness break for employees who are interested.

Most employers know by now that fit, healthy employees are more productive than their out of shape counterparts and have fewer sick days overall. If you can present some figures to your boss, they may see that giving up 30 minutes a day for employee fitness will actually recoup them more hours in saved sick time they just may bite.