Why You Don't Have Time to Move
"I don't have enough time."This is the biggest excuse of anyone wanting to make any kind of change these days.The time copout is convenient, seeing as there are always things demanding our attention and pulling us in a million different directions.Yet the same people that make the time excuse are often watching hours of television, checking email too much and too many other activities where their precious life energy is being sucked into a screen to never return again.Time. Our most precious resource, yet we all seem to be so poor in it.I'm not going to spend this article talking about why we're all so poor in time (working too much to buy things that don't make us happy), but instead I want to take a different approach.Let's assume that you are currently wasting zero time (highly unlikely, but I'll play along) and you really don't have an extra hour a day for movement.You might not realize it, but this is actually the perfect situation.Why? Because your only choices right now are to either accept sedentary life, or find a way to make a lifestyle of movement integrated in your other activities, which is actually the whole point of movement anyway.If you must integrate movement, and not compartmentalize it into a box in your day, you'll have to find ways to get more movement with the circumstances and environments you find yourself in.In order to do this, we have to make a paradigm shift: movement is not just about our typical definition of exercise or what we might experience in a gym or yoga class.Movement is the continual feeding of your body new inputs through a change in position.So, let's assuming you're doing the 30 day squat challenge right now.You basically have two options:
- Try to fit your squat into a designated period for exercise (likely at a gym or something)
- Find a way to integrate squatting into the things you're already doing
The former option is the paradigm of fitness, the latter is the paradigm of a lifestyle.We all know that when we try to force ourselves to do things in unnatural ways it rarely sticks. Diets hardly ever work in the long term, and neither do promises to stick to an awkward, robot-like gym routine.So, assuming you're going to choose the second option, how would you integrate at least 10 minutes of squatting into your day?Well, you might squat...
- While cutting vegetables for dinner
- Brushing your teeth
- Working on your laptop (you'll need a low table like a coffee table for this)
- Waiting for the bus
- Texting a friend (your knees in the squat happen to the perfect platform for holding your smart phone, the antidote for "text neck")
- Playing with your toddler
- Folding laundry
- Mopping the floor (like a ninja)
- Pulling weeds in the garden
- Mapping out your next project on the floor with index cards
- Eating your oatmeal
- During your morning meditation
- Saying your evening prayers
- Reading a book
- Putting away your groceries
These are just all the possibilities I came up with in the last five minutes of thinking about it. I'm sure you can come up with even more.Multi-tasking has gotten a bad rap these days. And I do think that constant task switching is a good way to kill your progress in your work. But, maybe there is a way we can benefit from the mindset of integration.After all, Bruce Lee was known to be doing dumbbell curls while working on his side splits, reading a book and eating breakfast.If the primal movement movement was happening in his day I bet he'd have been squatting too.Maybe he was on to something.So, integrate and stop compartmentalizing. Of course, the problem with this is that you no longer have any excuses.How can YOU integrate more movement into your life without needing more time?Share with us your ideas for squatting more in the comments. photo credit: LOLCLOCK