6 ways to adapt your weekly workouts when life gets busy
6 ways to adapt your weekly workouts when life gets busy
When life gets busy and routine slips, it’s great to have ways to adapt your usual workouts so you can maintain your exercise habit and keep looking after yourself. Then when things let up, it’s far easier to get back to it, without losing motivation.
Bring it home
Though we love being outdoors and definitely promote getting involved in exercise communities, when life gets hectic, the first thing you can do is try shortening workouts and doing them at home instead. This way they can be super flexible around whatever you have on and are a massive time saver. But as feeling motivated to exercise at home can often be tricky, try using the following tips to make things quicker, more enjoyable and achievable. Or if you’d like to workout with us at home, grab yourself one of our mind & body workout rentals or memberships for the Brave On-Demand workout library.
Strip it back
Take what you usually do and think of stripping things right back to the essentials, like homing in on only one or two practices or specific goals. Your time and energy is precious when you are busy, choose the goals that you care about the most or that give you the most enjoyment. For instance, if you usually do a full-body session at the gym, but you are feeling motivated most on improving your push-ups, strip things back to doing 3 sets of push-ups every other day instead. Or if you used to go to 3 different classes every week, ask yourself which one gives you the biggest boost in your week, then focus on just this one for now.
Split it up
Another way of making things more manageable is by taking the same longer workout you normally do and breaking this up into smaller chunks that can be spread out over a few days e.g. a 60 min workout becomes 4x 15 min workouts. You could do this by focusing on an area of the body at a time eg Chest, Back, Legs and Core if you’re strength training or Backbends, Balances, Hip Openers and Splits if you practice Yoga, letting the other areas rest whilst you train the next. These can then be easily spread out throughout the week and slotted in around your schedule.
Go easy
When you’re busy, often energy is low too. So if you’ve been challenging yourself with heavy loads of complex movements, maybe this is the time to reduce it down and allow things to be that bit easier and not so strenuous. Remember you are aiming for maintenance, not your personal best! So if walking rather than running, reducing the weight or choosing the modified exercise means you actually do the workout rather than putting it off, then this is a win.
Go shorter but harder
Busy times can bring with it stress and pent up energy, therefore you might actually be after a workout that allows you to blow off some steam but still saves time. Interval training is a style of exercise that alternates between periods of low, medium and high intensity activity, performed over a short amount of time, helping to improve stamina, boost endorphins and relieve stress. This could mean trying things such as: turning your long run into some short hill sprints, putting on some music and dancing vigorously on the chorus and slowly on the verse or trying an online HIIT Class. However you want to do it, the idea is to challenge yourself for short bursts and then allow yourself to rest and recover in between, all in as little as only 5 minutes.
Try combos
Combo exercises are a combination of two or more exercises done together, great for working out lots of areas of the body in just one movement and allowing you to get a lot done in a short amount of time e.g. squat and overhead press, lunge and bicep curl, burpees or a yoga sun salutation. We would suggest picking 2 - 6 combo movements and doing them as a pair or circuit at home. Do 6-12 reps on each exercise with 10-30 secs rest between moves, then rest for 60 secs between sets. You can then do as many sets as you have time for. Or alternatively try this Combo Class from our Brave On-Demand.
Remember:
We hope these tips help you take care of yourself, but remember not to beat yourself up if things do slip or you manage nothing at all; this is normal and we all do it. Just be kind to yourself, learn from it and use it to know how to support yourself next time. Then don’t worry, just pick things up again when you're ready. You could always use our blog: How to get back to exercise after a long break to help.