While it’s best to workout long enough and consistently enough to reap all the health benefits that you get from exercise, life doesn’t always cooperate. Not everyone has the time for daily exercise or even every other day exercise.
You’re too busy with work, your kids’ activities or life’s interruptions. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t still stay fit. If you’re crunched for time, remember that even a short workout is better than no workout at all.
You might be so busy during the week that working out is just not something you can do. Studies have shown that there’s no need to feel stressed about that or to think that you can’t get or stay fit because you can’t follow a weekly routine.
Instead, what you can do is focus on working out on your days off or on the weekend. It’s been proven that exercising even just twice a week can do just as much for your body as exercising multiple times during the week.
You may have heard the term weekend warriors and if that’s the only time that you have to exercise, your body will still reap the rewards. In fact, your health can be just as good as someone who gets to exercise more often during the week.
For those who can’t find the time to exercise weekly, you can pack all the fitness benefit into an exercise routine that you just do once a week like on Saturday or Sunday. This is because the recommended basic exercise amount is to either do 2.5 hours of moderate aerobic exercises spread over the course of a week or 1 hour and 15 minutes of vigorous exercise in one day.
While many people can’t commit to spreading a routine out to get the 2.5 hours, they can do an hour and fifteen minutes on one day. So you exercise just once and still be able to remain fit and healthy.
What you have to keep in mind with a shorter workout is that there will be some things you’ll miss out on. More regular exercise gives you benefits like mood boosters, better appetite control and better sleep.
However, you will get what matters, what the purpose of exercise is – which is to stay as healthy as possible, lower your risk of certain diseases and heart-related events. If you have specific goals in mind, such as running a marathon or tightening up your abs, then you’ll need to find a way to have longer workouts more often.
If you’d rather try to exercise during the week but you’re still pressed for time, you can aim for 10 to 15 minutes of exercise. And doing things like cleaning your house, vacuuming, washing dishes, sweeping and mopping, shoveling snow, shopping for groceries can all burn calories and counts as exercise. All you need to do is track your time to hit the recommended number of minutes.
