by Louis Degnan, EP
American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise each week to support cardiovascular health. The American College of Sports Medicine also recommends training each major muscle group two times per week to help improve strength over time.
Together, these guidelines can feel like a lot of time to dedicate to exercise. However, approaching fitness like a checklist of chores can make it harder to stay consistent.
Instead, the goal is to build a routine that fits into real life. Here are a few practical ways to make exercise a healthy lifestyle habit.
1. Set yourself a practical amount of time to exercise EVERY day.
Could you squeeze the previously mentioned guidelines into a couple training days per week? Sure. However, this would require several hours a day to accomplish. That may not be practical for most especially on a consistent basis.
Life happens; kids need to be picked up from school, some after-hour work emails need answering, house projects need to be completed or at least started. These and many other barriers to longer workout sessions make it very challenging to adhere to an exercise routine.
Even 30–45-minute workouts each bout may also be impractical. Let’s say you were hit with a blizzard that required hours’ worth of shoveling, making a formal training session after such a task near impossible. Let’s say you’re able to work out 30 minutes a day every day for a week but on that 8th day you’re absolutely spent and can’t bring yourself to keep the streak going. We absolutely form habits through repetition, but that repetition must be sustainable. We recommend you set an achievable floor of daily exercise when organizing your weekly workout routine.
For example: dedicate at least but not limited to 15 minutes a day to exercising in any capacity. Some days might look like that hour and half worth of work but in the gym, some days might look like a 45-minute jog, and some days might look like a 15-minute HIIT workout or sometimes even 15 minutes of stretching or mobility work for active recovery. This way, we set ourselves up for achieving habitual exercise habits in a sustainable and safe way.
Bonus Tip: Avoid trendy social media challenges. that sell intensity along with consistency. Two 45-minute workouts a day for 75 days won’t happen if we can’t consistently workout once a day for at least 15 minutes.
2. Treat workouts like appointments in your schedule
You’d be hard pressed to find someone missing a scheduled time for a flight or a dinner date but find plenty of people skipping leg day. You may have an idea in your head of when you’re working out, what you’re working out, and for how long you plan to work out but until pen hits paper (or gym membership card hits ID scanner) you can find plenty of excuses not to.
One way to circumvent this trap is to treat your workouts like appointments. Write it or log it into your schedule so that you view it as an event you cannot or at least should not miss. For example, every Thursday Monday at 6:00pm-7:00pm you’re training legs. This way, exercise is not an arbitrary task that you view as a chore to be done but an appointment or event like everything else on your calendar that you must try your best to attend. This can help you not only formulate a training split but also visualize your weekly training volume on whatever canvas your calendar lies.
Bonus Tip: Be flexible but firm. Get comfortable with moving exercise times around like you were rescheduling an appointment but view canceling these appointments as a last resort.
3. Join a group class
When it comes to exercise adherence, we are our own worst enemy. Every excuse in the world could be made to not exercise. Some valid are like a recent injury or a work meeting you cannot move. Many others such as “I don’t feel like it”, “my friends want to hang out”, or “I already worked out a few days ago” are not so compelling. Joining a group class helps increase accountability as they usually are billed separately from ones gym membership. Sometimes, there are even classes that charge you even if you don’t attend! Making exercise a so one’s event can also increase adherence. Grab a few friends to take your weekend morning circuit class with to make the activity more enjoyable.
If you don’t particularly enjoy traditional aerobic exercise, joining a group class can be a more engaging way to meet weekly training needs than monotonous moderate intensity jogging or biking. Classes like Orange Theory, Pelaton, and Crossfit offer various forms of high intensity interval training within them, making each of them optimal for VO2 Max training in the absence of more formal sprint interval work.
Resistance training in a group setting can be tricky. Most classes, even that advertise weight training within them, involve short rest periods to elevate your heart rate and make you “feel” like you have got a great workout. In terms of weight loss, you did! You burned hundreds of calories, lifting weights in a short amount of time. However, short rest periods negatively impact the quality time under tension needed to grow muscle. Performing one exercise for 30 seconds, resting for 30 seconds or less, and then performing a different exercise for 30 seconds (for multiple rounds of circuits) will certainly tire you out from a cardiopulmonary perspective. But specific skeletal muscles, especially the secondary movers for each exercise, most likely did not get the appropriate load or volume of work to stimulate muscle growth.
Some Crossfit gyms offer a “barbell club” that offers classes with heavier weights, longer rest periods, and lower repetitions to build strength but if you have a goal to build muscle mass it is important to compare different class structures to ensure you’re getting what you pay for.
Bonus Tip: Choose a class that challenges you. For example, If you already enjoy things like running or lifting weights but struggle to get your stretching in; joining a yoga class to work on mobility!