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Find Exercise in Life’s Margins

by Nick Crocker

Quick Takes

You consider yourself a fit, active person. But, like most busy professionals, you want to exercise more. You want to hit the gym more frequently; you want to finally start taking that yoga class or make that 7 a.m. boot camp in the local park. And then time and again, life just gets in the way. You’re too busy. You work too late. The kids are sick. You book a breakfast meeting. You have work and social commitments that you just can’t miss. And in all the chaos, exercise gets squeezed out. This, in reality, is most people’s experience of exercise.

The reality is that those spare hours in the week are not going to materialize. We need to come up with a different solution. The key is to find exercise in the daily flow of your life. Doing so will boost your productivity, performance, and job satisfaction.

First, reset your expectations

Exercise has no lower limit. Every bit counts. But setting the bar too high is a recipe for consistent failure. Your exercise goal this week should be your current average minutes of exercise per week plus five. Next week’s goal should be to add five more. The mistake many successful people make is to assume that it’s all or nothing. Either you’re training for a marathon or you’re doing nothing at all. The goal in all cases should be progress, not perfection.

Have a short memory

They say great NFL quarterbacks need to have short memories. If they make a mistake, they forget it quickly and move on. The last bad pass shouldn’t impact their shot at the next great one. The same goes for exercise. Forget sedentary days and weeks immediately. Your exercise past is not your exercise future. Deeming yourself an exercise failure is a relative and pointless judgment to make.

Plan to miss one week every month

When you’re planning a new exercise routine, expect to lose one week out of four to a mixture of work travel, holidays, events (weddings, bar mitzvahs, Super Bowls), sickness, injury, and unexpected intervening events. If you expect life to go smoothly, you are in for a shock. There will always be disruptions. It’s not about how you exercise in a good week; it’s about how quickly you recover from a bad one.

Set seven-day goals

You can plan with reasonable certainty what you will be doing four days from now. Four weeks is much harder to divine. So, make all your exercise goals fit within a seven-day period. After seven days, set new goals for the following week. That way, you don’t overwhelm yourself with change. It’s compartmentalized and easier for the mind to process. And don’t tie exercise to weight goals. If you attempt the two with too much intensity, you’re likely to crash. Exercise is a constant, not an intervention to solve a problem.

Orient to social and playful

Over time, you’ll orient toward pleasure and away from pain. If exercise is painful, you’re doing it wrong. If you hate the rowing machine, then stop doing it. Find exercise that feels playful or enjoyable for you. Walking, gardening, climbing, hiking, kayaking. And if possible, make it social, too. Our minds seek play and social connection naturally. If we couch exercise in those two concepts, we can transform the experience.

Exercise in the margins

Instead of taking the elevator at work, take the stairs. Once in the morning, once at night, and twice (up and down) when you go for lunch. Instead of getting off at your normal bus stop, get off one stop early and walk the rest of the way to work. Do the same on the way home. Once a week, take a walk while you call your mother (or any other deserving family member). If phone conversations aren’t your thing, see if you can schedule one of your regular meetings as a walking meeting and talk business while you walk.

The reality is that most people can’t exercise in the conventional “weights and treadmill at the gym” way more than once or twice a week. And many struggle with even that. This is a hard truth that will not change. Finding exercise in your day’s margins is the only way to start living a sustainable, active life.

Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, May 23, 2012.