For anyone who has trouble getting to the gym or working out as often as you’d like, I come bearing good news: Your workouts don’t have to be crazy hard, they don’t have to be long, and they certainly don’t have to take place in a fancy gym or studio.
Unfortunately, thanks largely to expensive boutique fitness classes, gyms that smell like eucalyptus, and a mindset that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, we’re often sold the idea that a short, simple workout “doesn’t count.” That’s a problem. Not only because it helps prevent the wellness movement from being accessible to all, but because it means each of us are missing opportunities to get in some work. Because look: I’m busy! I know you are, too. Sure, there are times when you can block off 90 minutes and get a thorough workout in, but if we think every session needs to be some intense marathon sweatfest, we’ll never get it done.
This is why I love the idea of exercise “snacks”: shorts bursts of exercise that you can fit into those bite-sized free pockets of your day you often don’t know what to do with. I’m talking about just 20 minutes in the morning, or 20 minutes at night, in between calls or after you get back from dinner. The idea stems from a 2014 study which showed that three smaller sessions of physical exercise (around 12 minutes each) were more effective in lowering blood sugar—and keeping it lower for longer—than one 30-minute session. Which is great if you’re one of those people who can never seem to find time to work out between everything else you’re juggling. So maybe you don’t have a half an hour on any given day. But I bet you do have at least two 15-minute pockets.
For instance, I was recently in Chicago and spent a long day at a conference. I couldn’t fit a workout into my schedule. I wrapped my day by giving a talk and going out to dinner. When I got back to the hotel, I was dead tired and I wanted to go to bed. Instead, I went to the gym and set a timer for 20 minutes. I told myself, “You don’t got to be there long, but you got to do something.” I did a circuit involving ten dumbbell presses, ten stability ball push-ups, ten dynamic bosu ball push-ups, and then a 400-meter run. I repeated that three times (with short breaks in between) and that was it. It took me less than 25 minutes. But it can be even easier than that. Because High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is so popular, people often think a short duration has to mean a high level of exertion. But sometimes my snack is just ten minutes of stretching and five minutes of jump-roping.
The point here is just to do something, to get your body used to moving. I always say I want to “make movement a movement,” so that we can get people thinking about a workout as some simple body movement, not as blasting your pecs into oblivion.
