One of the top five excuses for not working out is a lack of time. Most people who use this excuse point to their busy work schedule, time spent commuting to and from work, and their busy home life once they leave work.
On the weekends, the no time excuse is paired with the need to catch up on chores around the house, spend time with family or they need time to relax and not do anything.
Even though it’s used as an excuse, the problem is actually not a lack of time. Everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day. Yet, plenty of people with busy schedules find the time to exercise.
So it’s not the lack of time that’s the issue at all. It’s how you choose to allot those same hours that you’re given. You choose every day how you’re going to spend your portion of that 24 hours.
You might spend half an hour texting a friend or playing a game on your phone. Or maybe you spend an hour watching television. You might spend a couple of hours on a weekend going out to eat with friends.
Or you might be at home checking out what’s happening on social media, which is one of the biggest time wasters there is. It’s easy to tell yourself that you’re going to pop onto Facebook or Twitter or Instagram for just a second and then the next thing you know, you’ve spent an hour or longer browsing the feed.
What’s happening is that you’re trading the time you do have to exercise for other things. You’re subtracting from your allotted hours every day by choice because you do have the time to exercise if you truly wanted to.
The problem is that people become comfortable with their excuses. It’s easier to not do something than to do it. It’s easier to stay out of shape or overweight than it is to face the truth.
It’s more honest to tell yourself that you’re rather waste portions of your time on anything except exercise than it is to continue to deny the truth. You make the “no time” excuse because you view exercise as something that’s forced on you.
Exercise is viewed like work – something to just get through so you can get on with your life. Anything you see as not being fun is going to make you want to run from it. The key to overcoming the lack of time excuse is to find what motivates you to work out and then make that workout fun. When it’s something that you enjoy, you’ll look forward to working out rather than finding reasons to put it off.
