Time-Management Tips for Working Out

Whether you put money into retirement savings or put time into learning a new skill, you understand the power of an investment. Consider your time like a bank account. Like money, you want to see your time work for you so invest in the activities that enhance your health and well-being, including getting in enough time to work out.

Just like your money, you can budget your time so that you get in a workout each day with your Pilates equipment. Investing in your health can pay great dividends in your future and using a Pilates reformer from Frame Fitness helps you build a healthier, more balanced future. Using the tips in this post, you can help manage your time to ensure you get in the activities vital for your health and well-being.

Assess Your Time and Your Needs

With normal routines, you may find it easy to go through the motions each day until the weekend. Even those of us with the best of intentions to work out or squeeze in an extra session have found ourselves looking back at the week, wondering where the time has gone. Being mindful of your time helps give you more flexibility in your day. Regular workouts on a Pilates reformer can help enhance your practice of mindfulness, and you can apply the concept to your awareness of time.

Mindfulness provides an active state of awareness. While you don’t have to be chained to an absolute schedule, mindfulness in terms of time can allow you the freedom to operate more flexibly with intentional boundaries that guard your time. Training yourself to be more mindful of your time allows you to have time for what you need and limit or eliminate things that diminish your availability.

When you’re trying to fit in a regular, daily workout or expand your current fitness regimen, you need to take an honest look at your daily routine. Whether you commute to work, have a flexible schedule, or stay at home and manage your household, accounting for your daily activities and how long you spend at each can help you carve out time for fitness.

Follow these steps to best assess your time:

1. Write everything down. To truly be mindful of your time, you need to know where the time actually goes. So for a week, record what you’re doing and for how long you do it. You can make this step as simple as you want to—from writing it on paper to making a simple spreadsheet—but force yourself to record your activity as soon as you’re finished.
   
   Although this step sounds simple, you need to stay on top of it. You don’t want to estimate everything at the end of the day, and you don’t want to miss recording how much time you spend on your phone. Just be sure to categorize whether you’re doing personal tasks or something associated with work.
   
   You want your log to be as accurate as possible. So make your time-keeping as simple as possible to ensure you write everything down accurately. Also, don’t pressure yourself to keep a certain schedule just because you’re writing it in a log. Record what your natural week looks like.
   
2. Take note of what affects your time. If your commute was longer than usual because of a backup on the highway, note that when you jot it down in your log. If you stayed late at work one day, write down why. This step helps you become more mindful not of where your time goes but why. Many people work regular hours, but if you’re supposed to work just eight hours in one day, jotting down why you’re working nine or more can help the next steps of this process.
   
3. Mark and prioritize the mandatory activities. Start with the obvious activities in this step. Mark or highlight anything that you consider mandatory and then list the activities by priority. Of course, you need to prioritize working out, but mental health should be prioritized as well. So be sure to list other activities that positively impact your health, such as getting together with friends.
   
4. Consider what negatively impacts your mandatory activities. Now pull out those notes and make some decisions. Check out what causes you to extend your time and decide if those pressures are reasonable. Although there’s nothing you can do about a traffic delay during your commute, you may be surprised to find where you’re wasting time. Even if it’s just ten minutes, if you waste ten minutes three times, you just forfeited the chance to get in a thirty-minute workout. So take this step seriously and deliberately.
   
   If you’re working late, consider whether you’re maximizing your work hours, taking on too much responsibility, or receiving undue pressure from your boss. If you find yourself staying up too late, evaluate whether you watch too much TV, procrastinate starting household tasks, or bring unnecessary work home with you. Once you get started accounting for even small amounts of time, you may be surprised at how much useable time you can find in a day, especially when you check out how much you might needlessly be on your phone.

Now you should have a better awareness of what you need to accomplish each day as well as where you may be wasting time. So take an honest look at where working out can fit in. Calculate where how much extra time you really have in a day when you factor out time-wasting activities. Then you can set up ways to ensure you use your time efficiently and give the most each activity you have in a day.

When you use a Pilates reformer by Frame Fitness, you can easily squeeze in a workout—or two—in a day. Having Pilates equipment at home means you don’t waste time commuting back and forth to the gym and you don’t have to plan around a scheduled class time. You have your workout ready to go whenever you are.

Set Up an Efficient, Flexible Schedule

Since the pandemic began, we have learned to be flexible with how, where, and when we operate. So use that theme to set up a schedule that includes plenty of time for working out. The following tips help you use your log and list of priorities to set up a schedule that works for you and your fitness goals:

• Block off time for your needs. Obviously, you need to block off time for work, family, and even those tasks that we may groan at, such as buying food, doing laundry, and cleaning. However, if you noticed from your log that you tend to waste time procrastinating or allow these tasks to pile up and take more of your time, then be sure to block off time for as many tasks as possible to ensure you have a spot in your day dedicated to starting and finishing them.
  
  You should also consider working out as a need. Using your Pilates reformer from Frame fitness offers both mental and physical benefits that allow even everyday tasks to be completed even easier. The increased body awareness, good posture, and better balance all help even the simplest of movements to be made more safely and efficiently.
  
• Know what workout you’re going to perform. Nothing eats away at your time like agonizing over decisions. Whether you’re unsure about what you should do each day, or you tend to change your mind often, scheduling exactly which workout you should do for the day helps you have at least a frame of reference.
  
  Some people aren’t planners and like to work out more intuitively. If that works for you, still have something planned but, after all, flexibility is the theme. So feel free to switch it up—just try to do it before you dig into your scheduled workout time. Even a five-minute decision reduces your workout time by five minutes.
  
  Frame Fitness makes this planning simple. With the ability to stream workouts to their Pilates reformer, you can browse through and select workouts based on instructors, muscle groups, and more. So you can plan out your entire week with a variety of whole-body challenging workouts based on your level and experience with your Pilates equipment.
  
• Take out time-wasting activities. A time-wasting activity refers to anything that both: doesn’t benefit you and draws time away from the things you need to do. When you prioritize activities, those that benefit your mental and physical health need to be included in your day, just like a prescription. Things that waste your time should be eliminated, which can also help your physical and mental health because you’ll have more time for working out.
  
• Maintain flexibility. Schedule your day in ways that allow for hiccups such as delays in traffic, meetings that run late, and other natural interruptions in the day. You can plan for the unexpected with some flexible scheduling tips.
  
  Use a block schedule where you block off sections of time for specific activities. A block schedule allows you to move whole sections of your day to allow for flexibility, or you can use any extra time you didn’t need in one block to carry over to the next.
  
  You can also overestimate your timing, creating a natural buffer for everything you need to do. So if you schedule a bit more for your commute to allow for delays and you discover that you’ll be at work ten minutes earlier, resist the drive-thru urge and just get started ten minutes sooner on work. You’ll have gained ten minutes that you can redeem later for the unexpected.

Control what you can, and you can ensure that you have time for fitness each day, even when the unexpected pops up. With your Frame reformer, you can be sure that your workout is always ready and waiting whenever you are so that you have time to get in a daily, whole-body workout.