How can you fit exercise into your day?

How do you fit in exercise into your already busy day?

I get asked this question all the time. I know how busy you are, I understand that. As women, we pride ourselves on being bl@*!dy amazing at everything we do. Perfectly organised and perfectly and beautifully put together. Serene on the outside, looking calm to the world and underneath working frantically to do 3 jobs at once and none to the best of our ability.

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The other question is: how do you do it all, Adele?

The honest answer is I don’t. Nobody really does. I make sacrifices, I miss things. But the one thing I know for sure and the one thing I don’t let go of is my exercise. I exercise for my mental health and my families well being. If I don’t get my ‘calm fix’ or ‘run off the crazy’ my gorgeous family pay the consequences.

So I get outside and I walk (well I don’t walk I run because I don’t have time to walk!)

I need to plan, organise and execute my exercise routine at the beginning of the week so that I can go and create some chaos 😉 somewhere else in my life. My exercise comes first.  Call me selfish.

School half term, holidays and sickness can all throw a spanner in the works, for me and for you but don’t worry. If you start a long-term exercise habit, the habit will make sure that you are itching to get back to your exercise habit when your schedule will allow.

Your long-term exercise plan means you can drop a week here and there.

Even if you do miss a week or two because of the unexpected glitches in your life, you will never lose the benefit from your long term exercise habit. It takes at least 2 weeks before your body starts to lose muscle tone. Just remember your body likes to keep balance, in my world we call that – homoeostasis which means your body likes to stay in equilibrium. Put simply you won’t feel the effect of missing a week of exercise – promise it has been proven 🙂

Even if you can’t do the exercise you have planned or want because of last minute diary changes, holidays or sickness it doesn’t matter. Regular exercise means you are making positive steps forward all the time. Unlike a ‘diet’ nothing is wasted, there is no going back there is just more learning and adapting.

Long-term exercise starts with walking

Improving your overall exercise routine becomes a long term habit.   Working daily towards hitting your 10k steps will change the way you think about exercise. For instance, you will decide not to jump in the car when you can walk.  You also remember that getting outside makes you smile. Simply saying hello to somebody helps to improve your mood. You can’t be grumpy and all day, somebody you meet is bound to make you smile and bounce 🙂

 

Don’t miss: Healthy eating and exercise easy by your motivation so so

 

When you make positive memories like this you pave the way to make more of these memories. It happens because of the habit.  Walking outside and spending time planning your exercise becomes easier because you spend less and less time on the mental deliberation, you just go and do it. Your exercise habit takes over.

Stress and Emotional Eating, it happens to us all

If weight loss is your goal then increasing your exercise will help. However, exercise is NOT an instant 6-week miracle cure. It does take time and yet your transformation will come. Initially, internal changes will occur in your body, be patient and let those changes occur first.

Combining your exercise with becoming ‘a healthier eater’ will speed up those body and shape changes. And although binge eating occurs when you are stressed, your overall exercise pattern will minimise these binges. Whilst you will still encounter stress and emotional eating times you will begin to have clarity and recognise those moments.  On the Get Gorgeous programme, the gorgeous girls and I have little ‘tricks’ up our sleeves to prevent those stress eating times taking over.  We use breathing, calming and other weird cosmic tricks to give us the help we need to turn those emotional times into a solution.

Trust the gorgeous process.

Short term solutions to these emotional triggers work but they work better when you have your long term habits embedded.

If you like the idea of working with me start simple start with the 10 days Pilates ‘no more tummy’ challenge Click here to find out more about my tummy challenge.

Find out more!

Here are a few other things to consider:

1. Start by being more active in what you do RIGHT now

Thousands of gorgeous women have benefited from joining me in the #tenthousandstep challenge #walkingchallenge. I post my happy steps each Sunday over on Instagram using the #selfcaresunday.  Together we encourage each other to up our daily steps and make the effort to go out for a walk for short trips when otherwise we may have jumped in the car.  Getting out and about and feeling better for being outside, begins to fit into your daily routine.

Bear in mind that you don’t have to start at 10,000 steps.  You can start at 3,000 steps and we work together to increase them slowly.

2. Change your mindset: think ‘you are ACTIVE’ right now

A Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer discovered that convincing your mind that you are already active will impact on your body.  She found that if you are told and believe that you are active, even if you change nothing else in your life your body will make changes. I understand that sounds a bit far-fetched, but our subconscious minds are way more powerful than our conscious minds.

So follow through with her research, which states that if you believe yourself to be in an active job your body will start to act and feel fitter. Your body makes changes simply because you have believed yourself to be active.

Here are the research details it is called the ‘Maid survey’. It is very famous in the exercise world. Langer, the researcher, started out wanting to know whether your perception of how much you exercise has any effect on how your body actually looks. To do this, she studied hotel maids. Langer found that most of these women didn’t see themselves as physically active. She did a survey and found that 67 percent reported they didn’t exercise. More than one-third of those, reported they didn’t get any exercise at all.

The researcher noted that despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the general recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity.  So Langer divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the definition of an active lifestyle. The other group was given no information at all.

One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

 

Read also: Love exercise by tricking your brain

 

The explanation for these changes in their body is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting changed the maids’ behaviour. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset.

3. Add in more activity to your day

When the phone rings at work, go hands-free and walk around as you talk. It is a simple trick but it works. And/or set a timer on your phone and get up and get a glass of water. Then there is the obvious one – get up earlier 😉

If you are looking for crazy here is my exercise plan.

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During the week my husband and I decide who is going to exercise on Saturday and who is going to exercise on Sunday morning. We organise our exercise play mates and make sure we stick to the morning we have selected. We get up early on our weekend exercise day and get out of the house so we don’t get involved in the family mayhem. Early for us is 7:30am.

When I was working full time in an office I used to exercise during my lunchtime and eat at my desk later, red-faced, no shower.

Currently, I am out teaching 3 days and 2 evenings. On the days I work during the day I go out for a run just before I pick the kids up – 3/4 hour and finish the run at the school gates – red-faced, no shower.
On the evenings that I work after we have all had breakfast at 7 am I exercise at 7:30am whilst kids are making their own sandwiches – which is messy but it is good for their development skills 🙂 I exercise for 40mins and then take them on the school run, red-faced, no shower.

I suppose what I am saying is that in my busy schedule something has to give and for me, it is personal grooming! You may like some of these ideas or can see a glimmer of what you can do to fit in some ‘exercise time’ for you.

Or you may just think I am barking mad?

My mental health has always been focused on my exercise and what I eat so that I can exercise and feel good and have bags of energy to drive everyone else crazy 🙂

If you like the idea of working with me start simple start with the 10 days Pilates ‘no more tummy’ challenge

Find out more!

Speak soon much love

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