How Do I Get My Exercise in When I'm Time-Crunched?

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Learn more@mcafee.com online protection I need exercise Suggestions and I'm Not a Morning Person. This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Robyn Dollar from my Facebook group asked for exercise suggestions and tips for someone who works full time and isn't a morning person. She definitely underlined that part. And I'm going to reframe this to how do I get my exercise in when I'm time crunched? I'll be right back with the answer.

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All right, so let's dive in with starting out first because Robin said I'm not a morning person. When is the best time to work out? I'm sure you've heard, hey, the best time to work out is in the morning. And it's true. That's what the studies show it is. And probably one of the biggest reasons is because you get it done right and the day doesn't take you over and all of a sudden it's like ready to go to bed and you go, oh, shoot, I forgot to exercise. But I have a second answer to that question. And the best time to work out is dun dun when you'll work out. Because if you say I'm going to get up, I'm going to get up an hour earlier and work out. Come on. If you're not a morning person, that probably isn't going to happen. So that's the first thing is the best time to work out is when you will work out. And I'm going to give you a little secret in there. You got to schedule that in and make it non negotiable. If I was your personal trainer, I would schedule that in, make it non negotiable and charge you double if you bailed. The next thing is you want to track it. Remember what you measure and monitor, you can improve. And here's the cool thing, I like to teach people to fit fitness in. And what's awesome is it all counts. Going up and down the stairs, it counts. Walking the dog, it counts. But in order for it to really count, this all counts as movement. But I want you to also think of what you can do that gets you hot, sweaty and hurts a little bit. Because that's what really is going to work well as exercise. Now here's what's awesome and awesome for someone who's working a lot, maybe has a crazy schedule, gets up and gets out of the house in the morning, is you can divide your exercise into two to three segments. So instead of trying to do say 30 minutes all at once, think instead of doing 10 minutes three times or 15 minutes two times. And so here's what you could do with that first thing. And this is from my fast fitness program, which you can find@jjvirgin.com it can help you out. I've got four areas that I talk about in terms of being fit. I call it my core four. The first one is just move more. Just move more. My advice there is get a dog. Second one is to burst a blast fat. That's high intensity interval training, like sprinting and then walking it off. Running up the stairs and then coming back down them, dancing your face off and then, you know, just kind of moseying around, jumping rope and then walking it off. Something that you can do all out for 30 to 60 seconds and not a second more. And then you walk it off for about twice as long to recover and you go back to it. So that's bursting and then pumping it up is resistance training. You can use your body weight, you can use free weights, you can use cables. Whatever it is that is going to make it difficult for you to do more than say 20 to 30 seconds of that. I like to work in a range of an exercise repetition of 8 to 12 repetitions. That's how many times you do an exercise in one single set. And that should take you, that's, you know, I don't know, 15 to 20 seconds. But you shouldn't be able to go past, say 30 seconds. So if your body weight may not be enough in some of those situations. So that's weight training or pumping it up. And I've divided the body into four parts. Upper body pushing, things like push ups and dips and overhead presses. Upper body pulling, those are things like pull ups. You could do them. Might need a little help like I do bent over rows, upright rows, hips and thighs, things like plies and lunges and squats and step ups and then power core. And those are abs and low back muscles. So I've got it divided in the power core. This is where I like to put some the yoga flow and flexibility in there as well. So for power core, you could move that into your yoga practice and kind of do a little hybrid. Because the fourth part of fitness is flexibility. And so that could be restorative yoga. Or you could do a power yoga class and do part of it as restorative and get both your power core and your flexibility. So here's a couple ways you can fit this in. Number one, if you've got phone calls or you need to connect with someone, make it a walking date. So that's one of the things that I do is if I know I need to be on a phone call, I make it a walking phone call. And if it's something where I'm just an active listener, then I might just be active listening while I'm working out, doing my burst training, doing my resistance training. So that's an easy thing to do there as well. Then schedule it in. Look at if you've got a day where it's really crazy, look where you can put 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the midday, and 10 minutes in the evening. And Robin, I'm gonna tell you this is really important. What I'd love to see you do is say get up in the morning and go, okay, every morning I'm just gonna add 10 minutes of something in. And maybe this morning it's gonna be upper body pushing. Maybe next morning it's gonna be some burst training. And what's great is there's a lot of different things that you can do at home that require little or no equipment. So if you're trying to give me the I don't have a gym at home, it's okay. The floor and a chair can become your gym. So it's amazing what you can do. And again, I have a lot of that in my fast fitness program. But you got to schedule it in and you need to make it non negotiable and then commit to yourself. Ideally, hire a coach because boy, you know when you pay, you pay attention, right? And then most importantly, get moving. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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