Wouldn’t it be great if we had a magic wand that we could just wave that would make fitness easier to attain? I used to think that some people were just born fit and other people, well – we weren’t so lucky. Fitness is a state of mind, it’s who you want to be. It’s not just saying I want to be fit, it’s being active. In the words of a writer, fitness is about show, don’t tell.
Lifestyle Choices
When you make the choice to be more fit, you are talking about making lifestyle choices. The lifestyle choice could be as simple as going for a walk every evening after dinner and as complicated as joining a gym with a childcare facility in order to make sure your child can go with you.
If you work an irregular schedule, you may have more choices to make. For example, one of our readers MomSam works from 8 in the morning to noon, then again from six in the evening until ten. Her schedule allows her to be home when her children are and she doesn’t go back to work until her husband is home. Her schedule is pretty demanding with only about an hour of time between when she gets home from work and when she must depart to pick up her children and start their afternoon activities. She has to fit her workout into that hour as well as anything else she might want to do for herself.
So what does she do? She alternates a thirty minute yoga session with cardio every day. She calls it her me time and even if she doesn’t make her weekend workouts, her weekdays give her the crucial time she wants to meet her physical and mental needs for being fit and healthy.
Catch as Catch Can
A.B. mother of two, ages 14 and 6, works a varied schedule from week to week. Sometimes she works weekends, sometimes she doesn’t and she can never be sure which days she’ll have off each week. In an effort to meet her own physical needs, she works out when she can. She runs outside when the weather is permitting, she works out inside when it’s not. Since she can’t maintain a stable workout schedule, she keeps a daily log that allows her to see how much time she spends on any one given activity. For example, if she spends two hours outside mowing, weeding and edging her lawn, that goes on her schedule. At the end of the week, she can account for the amount of exercise she got in, even if it isn’t the same every day at the same times.
Make Fitness Your Easy Choice
The important part about making fitness a lifestyle choice and making it easy for you is so that you will keep doing it. All the experts in the world can tell you what they do and I can tell you what I do, but what you need to know is what you can do and what is easy for you to maintain that level of fitness.
What do you do to make fitness the easy choice for you?