I don’t have any time

This is an especially popular excuse: “I can’t exercise because I don’t have any time.” We all lead hectic lives with little “me-time” and we couldn’t spend hours each day in the gym even if we wanted to. We have significant others and families to spend time with, jobs which require long hours and lengthy commutes, as well as other commitments in the evenings and at weekends.

But it is absolutely vital that you find some time, even if it’s only a few minutes, to squeeze some exercise into your daily routine. You’ll not only get fitter, it will do wonders for those ever-soaring stress-levels, and will make losing weight much easier.

So, how do you find an extra half-hour in every twenty-four that you won’t miss?

The Active Commute

If you possibly can, build exercise into your daily commute. Especially if it takes you longer than the national average (which has risen sharply in the past five years, from 35 minutes to 1 hour and 5 minutes). This is valuable time that you can spend more enjoyably than crammed onto sweaty public transport, or stuck in crawling lanes of traffic.

Split Exercise Throughout Your Day

Sometimes it’s tricky to find a half-hour chunk of time when you can exercise. How about doing three ten-minute sessions instead?

• Get up ten minutes earlier, and do some stretching and weight-lifting exercises while you’re still in your pyjamas
• Escape from the office for a ten minute brisk walk at lunchtime (just don’t make it a trip to the pub or newsagents…)
• Spend just ten minutes in the evening doing something active: pick your two favourite tracks and dance enthusiastically to them, jog on the spot during the advert breaks, or dust off that exercise bike in the garage.

It might not seem like a lot, but over the course of a week, you could burn over 1,100 calories – equivalent to a whole day’s food allowance for some dieters – just by doing the above exercises every day (figures based on an 11 stone woman)

This comes to:

• 168 cals/day
• 1176 cals/week

So what’re you waiting for? Get up now, and do something active, for just five minutes. And make sure you find half-an hour every day (either on your commute or in a spare ten minutes snatched here and there) to fit in exercise without it filling up your precious free time.