Exercise For the Amateur Athlete
Or how to train for life, not for a living
So perhaps you accept that physical training has much to offer you in your own life. The next problem is how to integrate this into your schedule and responsibilities.
This really boils down to a number of questions you simultaneously need to answer:
- How committed am I to my physical fitness, and how much time am I willing and able to spend on it?
- What are my other primary responsibilities, and where do these require time in my day?
- Within these restraints, what times throughout my week can I commit to exercising?
- What exercise should I actually do?
The first three are actually the important questions whilst number 4 is the one that breeds the most indecision. Let’s walk through an example and discuss how you can incorporate training into a busy schedule. You may have a full-time job, a wife and kids, a part-time hobby or other responsibilities. The point here is that only you will know what is most important for you to spend your time on; if done well, exercise will make you more efficient in your other pursuits and save you time whilst making you more effective, but ultimately you have to make this overarching decision.
1. How much time am I willing to spend?
There is no clear answer to question one — you simply have to gauge roughly where you will fit your own health into your hierarchy of priorities. Remember, though, that a surprising amount of your day, regardless of how busy you likely are, is going to be being spent aimlessly. You may be taking 2 hours around dinner to faff, or having a half hour sit down after getting in from work. Things such as your lunch break can reveal themselves as useful wells of additional time.
No-one has every complained that their quality of life has gotten worse after missing out on scrolling through Twitter for an hour before bed, or watching TV for half an hour when you get in from work. This is a huge opportunity to earn back time for yourself in your day.
Alongside this, you do not actually need long to see huge impacts on your fitness. If you managed to dedicate half an hour to exercise even two/three times a week, that would likely be enough to transform your health and wellbeing, and reap the benefits of training as a stimulus for growth.
The path forward therefore is to think critically about what allocations of your time are necessary. Some things you will not want to give up, and this is okay. Perhaps you need that extra hour in bed before work, or perhaps you do not. Perhaps you can make time at lunch a few times a week, but then perhaps that isn’t appropriate.
There are generally three options for people working full-time: train before work, train at lunch, or train after work. All have advantages and disadvantages.
i) Training before work
The major benefit here is that the exercise is scheduled early in the day, when you are fresh, and is unlikely to clash with anything else you might want to do at that time of day.
The downside might be that you don’t feel like exercising at that time, or you may have to wake up earlier to facilitate it. Additionally, some people feel that exercising before work can sap your mental energy for the day ahead. This is something you may need to experiment with yourself.
ii) Training at lunch
Again the benefit here is that this leaves your evening free; it is an efficient use of time that occurs during work, which can provide a nice break from whatever you’ve been doing.
The downside is that this might coincide with lunch meetings or social occasions depending on your situation, and might be too much of a commitment if you often have work requirements that spill over into lunch or prevent you from taking your allocated time always. You may also decide you prefer having lunch as a period of rest.
iii) Training after work
The major advantage is that you can take your time exercising here, and this will likely be the only option if you engage in team sports. Equally you may like that you are not interrupting your working day to train but doing it separately.
The downside is of course that this will inevitably clash with your social life on occasion, so it can be hard to schedule this in for set times each week. Will you really choose to exercise if the alternative is meeting your friends? Certainly not every time. This really suits team sports or training so that you can incorporate the social aspect.
Ultimately, each option involves some degree of opportunity cost with whatever else you might have done with the time.
I found myself at the start of this year desperate to improve my fitness and train more. I was preparing for military fitness tests and knew I wasn’t yet ready; I’d barely been running due to a knee injury and had focussed far more on strength than strength endurance in the past. You find very quickly that being able to bench press 300lbs doesn’t directly help you do 100 pressups.
At the same time, you can’t spend every free minute of your time in the gym, nor should you aim to. Only by having a realistic idea of how much time you want to devote to training can you navigate this. I tried to factor in that I’d very quickly resent not being able to go out with friends, so limited training in the evenings to once or twice whilst doing a few more in the mornings and at lunch. I even admitted to myself that if I was hungover, I probably wouldn’t be out of bed an hour early to train before work.
If possible, write a schedule that is rigid enough that you know if you haven’t been sticking to it. If you merely tell yourself that you’ll go to the gym three times this week, it takes you until Friday before you have to admit to yourself you aren’t going to do it.
Be wary of aiming to go hard every day if that isn’t you; this plan has to be in place for the long run, and you need a plan that you’d be happy to continue indefinitely. What’s the ideal schedule if you were to get everything you needed done and also enjoy yourself?
2. What Exercise Should I Actually Do?
The short answer is whatever you enjoy.
The long answer is that you need to think hard about what you want to achieve. Unlike the movies, where everyone is a perfect all round athlete with hulking muscles and yet the ability to jump between buildings, fight off multiple attackers and run marathons, in real life you will be constrained in what you can train for.
For more on this, deciding exactly on your training is covered here.
