Everyone knows fitness is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle, but for many, organizing it around the chaos of demanding careers, partners, children, the dog and all the extracurricular activities we manage to chain ourselves to can be sheer drudgery.
With so much on our ambitious American plates, breaking the cycle of skipping the gym can sometimes be just as hard as breaking the cycle of obsessing over it.
If this sounds familiar, you probably torment yourself with some of the following questions: How do I create a foolproof plan for actually getting to the gym? How do I make time for my training sessions without neglecting … well, let’s be honest: the parts of life that are more fun? How do I know what’s enough and what’s too little vs. what’s too much?
Well, with cheers to those everlasting New Year’s resolutions, here are a few tips that might just get us all healthily through the “to-dos” and the “too-much-funs” of the season.
Determine your minimal plan, and engrave it in your calendar.
Like any fun-loving Texan, spending time with family and friends is a priority of mine. Unfortunately, there exists a conglomerate of diseases that are ready and willing to permanently rob us of this valuable time if we are complacent with our health. In other words, regular fitness can have a big impact on our RSVP status.
What is meant by minimal, you ask? Well, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 minutes of “moderate-intensity aerobic exercise” five days per week (or 150 minutes per week) is recommended for adults.
Well, unless you hate to travel and have an exuberantly uneventful schedule, five days per week for the rest of your life is just not always going to happen. So, as far as minimums are concerned, I vote for a permanently scheduled three workouts per week.
If these workouts last for an hour, you’ve already superseded the required 150 minutes. If these workouts last for just 30 minutes, you’re only left with 60 minutes, which could easily be spent jogging with a friend and playing basketball with the kids.
If you are someone who has mastered the “a little each day” routine, aim low … say, 20 minutes per day.
In only committing yourself to small time increments, a trip to the gym feels significantly less daunting – thus, your likelihood of engaging in fitness increases.
As far as get-it-done, gold-star-slapping weight routines go, all you need is a pair of free weights and 15 to 20 minutes three times per week in front of your favorite television show. Luckily for us, guilty-pleasure television loves the intelligent talent crop of our youthful millennium, which makes daily exercise as simple as half a Botoxed episode of “The Real Housewives.”
That leaves us with no excuses, as all we really have to do is push the clicker and stand up.
Don’t forget to revise goals as appropriate.
Once you’ve reached that healthy weight, for example, you need to re-script your goals. Obviously, to continue to lose weight at this point and muscle-waste your way to malnutrition would nullify the entire game plan of this health-seeking venture.
A few new goals that would be appropriate at this point might include maintaining health and weight, increasing strength and balance and fine-tuning athletic ability.
Keep in mind: Fitness should only be obligatory to a point.
Making exercise mandatory on a daily basis can leave you with more than the just the much maligned nickname, “anal.” It can also lead to injury, muscle wasting and brain starvation, not to mention poor social relationships. Working out should never become something that runs one’s life, but rather, something that supports it.
When missing a single workout means completely hating yourself, I guarantee there is something else missing in your life than that last workout.
Adrienne Goodwin, LPC-intern, LMFT-associate, CI-CPT, is a therapist and fitness professional with Cedar Springs Austin Eating Disorder Center in Westlake. For more information, call 512-732-2400, or visit www.cedarspringsaustin.com.
