Finding Time to Exercise

As a working mom with two young kids, the one thing that I seem to lack most is time. There are so many things that I need to do for me and for my family and I never feel like I have time to fit it all in. One of the things that I have always struggled with is finding time to exercise. Which unfortunately, makes it easy for me to skip.

I've tried taking classes, figuring if I can schedule a specific time that I will be able to attend because it was planned and scheduled. The community center offers aerobics classes in the evenings, but between my husband's class schedule and trying to have family meals, it just never seemed to be something that I could consistently commit too. Sure, I will start the year, the month, the season, with good intentions, choosing a class that works around our current schedule, but it never fails that within a few weeks I will have an obstacle that will cause me to miss a class and suddenly, I can't seem to make them at all anymore.

So, I decided that I needed something I could do at home. We purchased an elliptical a few years back. When we first got it, I used it very regularly, but then again, I found it hard to find the time to consistently use it. I tried the evenings, but it always wound up getting too late and I didn't want to be kept awake by exercising too close to bed time. I tried the mornings, which I did very well for a long time, but invariably an early morning meeting or a late night or a cold or something would interrupt my routine of getting up to exercise and it would take me months to get back on track only to have another interruptions derail me again. I still do use it occasionally, but this was clearly not the answer for me.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I started walking semi-regularly on my lunch hour with some co-workers. At the time, we walked only a short distance and time. It felt good to get out and there was accountability. There was someone that I was meeting and someone that I didn't want to let down by not walking. Overtime, our walking group evolved. The old group, through life changes and more wasn't walking regularly anymore. Recently, I started to walk with another co-worker who works with my friend. She is an avid walker and walks not only a good distance, but a good pace. The new path that we walk at lunch is 2.75 miles long and we spend 40 minutes doing the walk. It is a much more intense walk and I feel better when I'm done. Because our schedules don't always jive, I've also started to include other friends and co-workers on the walk. I walk with different people everyday some weeks, but I walk. It is an intense enough walk that in the summer, I feel the need to change at least my shirt before I walk. I still can't make it every day, because of lunch meetings and the occasional work through lunch, but most days I do, and it really works for me. I have time to get in exercise and it doesn't interfere with anything that I need to do at home.

In addition, to my regular lunchtime walk, I also have been doing P90X for a while now. I am almost done with round 2. For some reason, P90X is different than other DVDs I have tried. I actually get up every morning and do the workout. Even yesterday, when I had to be to the airport by 7 am, I fit in a P90X workout before my shower. When I do oversleep for some reason, I still get up and do as much of the workout as I can. This makes a big difference for me, it was always that break in my routine that caused me to let the morning workout fall to the side, so by still doing the workout, even when I can't do the full thing, I never have a break in my routine - I am still up and exercising five days a week. I'm not sure if it is seeing results or the way I feel after working out, but something about P90X keeps me motivated to work out.

When it comes to finding time to exercise, getting up in the morning for P90X and using my lunch hour to walk works for me!

This post shared at Works For Me Wednesday.