As a busy professional, finding time to exercise can be a challenge. However, exercise is crucial for maintaining physical and mental health, and improving work-life balance. In this article, we’ll provide tips and tricks we’ve learned from coaching dozens of busy professionals.

Make exercise a priority and plan it into your schedule just like any other important task. Treat it as a non-negotiable part of your daily routine. As one of my former coaches used to say, “if fitness is important to you, you will find the time.”

Plan your workout sessions in advance and stick to the schedule. This will help you make time for exercise, even when you’re busy. One trick here is to have everything ready to go. If you plan on going to the gym after work, have your gym bag packed and in the car ready to go. If you have to stop by the house on the way to the gym, the couch is going to look very tempting!

You don’t always need to go to a gym to exercise. There are many at-home workouts you can do with little to no equipment. Utilize online resources for workout plans and tutorials. This is a great way to supplement any gym routine when your schedule just doesn’t allow for going to the gym.  Additionally, it gets you in the habit of working out consistently.

Staying motivated to exercise

If you go to the gym and you’re always doing the same thing, you’re going to get bored very quickly. Treadmills were originally designed as torture devices in the Medieval era, so it’s no surprise that people don’t stick with a routine that involves an hour of running on a treadmill for five days a week. By adding variety, you’ll keep it fresh and interesting and look forward to trying something new.

Almost everything is better with friends around, and that includes exercise. Friends will keep you accountable when you don’t feel motivated to get to the gym and pushing yourself.

Now that you’ve got your friends in the gym with you, you can get little competitions going.  Maybe you see who can lift more weight, do burpees the fastest, show up most in a month.  You’ll win some, you’ll lose some, but if you add in a little bit of healthy competition among your friends, it turns the daily grind of exercising into a game.

At East Lansing CrossFit, we have helped so many busy professionals achieve their fitness goals by using the strategies above.  As part of the CrossFit methodology, we are always adding variety into our daily programming. Whether that be cardio, weightlifting and strength training, or gymnastics, you will see all of them in a given week in different combinations and at different intensities.

Additionally, we have made our best efforts to create a social environment to provide a sense of community.  Most of our clients have professional careers so you’ll be joining a crew of like-minded people who are trying to improve their fitness while balancing their careers and family.

Finally, we keep a healthy sense of competition between our members.  We use our app to keep track of scores between members.  This may sound intimidating at first, but it’s a great way to track your own progress and find your strengths and weaknesses and help you to overcome them.  But then, something happens…you get that workout that’s right up your alley and you find yourself shooting to the top of the leaderboard.

If you’ve been having a hard time staying motivated to exercise, contact us today to receive a free week of CrossFit classes at East Lansing CrossFit.

Best of luck on your fitness journey!