SIGN UP FOR YOUR FREE DAY PASS TODAY!
It can be quite hard to fit training around a busy life- you’ve got work, kids, friends and family, as well as a whole host of other commitments keeping you from having time to hit the gym. Fitness classes are always a good bet, but they are tightly scheduled, meaning you may end up missing more than you make. Hitting the weights room is also always good, but bodybuilding and powerlifting workouts can take over an hour to complete. Get yourself a gym membership for the best gym in Dubai and prioritise your fitness today!
What can you do to make sure you hit your fitness goals when your life seems too busy?
These top tips will help you.
5 top tips
- Go into it with a training plan
Having a schedule and knowing your goals, and the path to hitting them, will save you a lot of time. Focussing on the goals that matter will mean you can trim the fat and only do what will benefit you- if you just want to get stronger, stop wasting time doing cardio, if you want to hit hypertrophy, ditch the massive, low-set compounds.
Scheduling every day of the week will also help to keep you on track. If you’re busy, the chances are that you timetable and book in everything. Booking in your training ahead of time, and knowing exactly what you will be doing, will keep you organised. It will also make you more likely to hit your goals, as you will be following a directed path rather than just doing what you feel like on any given day.
If you need access to a gym to maintain your fitness plan- as many of us do- get one that’s near you. Simply search for ‘gyms near me’, pick one that’s convenient, and go for it. It doesn’t need to be the best gym in the world, as long as it caters to your needs and helps you to keep to your life’s timetable.
- Train first thing in the morning
Unless you’re already chronically under-sleeping, the chances are that you won’t miss 20 minutes of sleep. Any deficit you may have in sleep will be more than made up for by the increased energy that comes hand-in-hand with living an active lifestyle and sticking to a good fitness plan.
Set the alarm 20 minutes (or even 30) early and use this time to train. Get in a solid home circuit session or perform a vinyasa flow- whatever is needed to hit your goals. If you need gym equipment, consider buying some free weights or even setting up a home gym in the garage. If you can’t do this, find a gym near you and head over there for a quick blast in the weights room. Shower there then head into work.
Get your workout out the way early and then live your life for the rest of the day.
- Fit it into your day-to-day
Though you may not be able to ‘train’ as part of your day-to-day life (who performs bench presses and deadlifts in their normal lives?), you can definitely ramp up the amount of activity your life contains. This will help you to maintain a healthy weight and will give you all the advantages of an active lifestyle, without taking too much time.
Walk or cycle to work. Use your lunch break to go for a stroll rather than sitting around. Instead of sitting on the couch in the evening, go for a jog while you listen to a podcast.
You can even fit a proper workout into any routine and do it from anywhere- the gym isn’t everything. There are plenty of at-home workouts you can do, often with little more than your own bodyweight being needed. YouTube has thousands (perhaps millions) of fitness videos, with everything from calisthenics to yoga, HIIT to core blasts. Pick one and perform it in your living room, when you can- it will be like doing your own fitness class.
- Build the habit and the rest will come
Quite often, we think we don’t have the time to train, but realistically we do. We’re just not into the habit yet, so the prospect of taking all that time out of each week to put into exercise can seem daunting.
With this in mind, work on building up the habit first, before you look at quality and duration of the workouts themselves. This is your biggest hurdle, so just focus on clearing it. If you overdo it at the beginning, fatigue may make you crumble- it may reaffirm your possibly misplaced belief that you don’t have the time. Start small and build up once you’re in the habit of training 2-4 days per week.
- Try going for little and often
With this in mind, you don’t need to hit marathon training sessions very often at all- if ever.
You want to be spending around 2-4 hours per week working out (subject to your own training plan and goals, of course.) However, it doesn’t actually matter too much how you split these hours up- you don’t have to hit two, hour long workouts a week that put a huge dent in your timetable. Instead, try for two 15-20-minute sessions per day, six days per week. This will give you plenty of training time, will allow you to hit your goals, but will be far more manageably slotted into your daily life.
