How to Start Working Out When You Have No Time? It Doesn’t Get Any Simpler Than This!

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Want to start exercising? Now, hand on heart. How many times have you told yourself that you don’t have enough time for it? Or that you’ll start exercising tomorrow, on Monday, in the new year, or at some other perfect moment that was supposed to magically change everything? I assume that if you’ve opened this article, you’re still waiting for that D-day. But before you start gazing at the stars again wishing for a perfect figure, let me tell you that there’s no perfect time to exercise.

It’s just an illusion that gives us some hope for a better tomorrow, but in reality, we’re just waiting for Godot. Balancing family, work, and training can be challenging, but wait! All is not lost. In today’s article, we’ll discuss how to find not the perfect, but your own time for exercise, which will finally kick-start the desired action and maybe change your life in exactly the direction you’ve wanted for a long time. Because this kind of self-care will pay off multiple times. So, how to start exercising without time?

Why Start Exercising Today?

In life, there’s one golden rule – if I want something, I go for it, and if I want it now, it was already too late to start after reading this sentence. You get what I mean? Every WANT of ours requires ACTION, and exercise is no exception. The reward won’t just be a good feeling, because this action can have a much broader impact on your overall life.

The fact that you finally start acting and learn to overcome initial resistance in this case can very likely transfer to other areas as well. Examples could be work life, learning new things, or any effort to achieve personal goals. Every small step towards action strengthens self-discipline and belief in one’s own abilities.

Immediate Benefits of the First Workout

Right after your first workout, you can immediately start reaping these benefits:

You’ll break the cycle of endless procrastination, which only wastes time. If you start now, you’ll avoid procrastination and gain immediate space for training. ^[1]
Improved mood and emotional reactivity (balance) after just one workout ^[2]
Immediate impact on cognitive functions, such as attention and memory ^[3]
A new athlete identity, which will reflect your fresh habits for an active lifestyle geared towards exercise, making them easier to maintain ^[4]
The feeling that you’re finally working on what you’ve long talked about until it seemed unattainable. And now it’s actually happening. Isn’t that great?
Satisfaction and a sense of victory that comes with every squat or extra minute of movement. All of this deserves recognition. So don’t just focus on your goal, but also enjoy the small successes that make up the whole. They also build your inner strength and motivation to continue.

Long-term Benefits of Exercise

However, the long-term benefits of physical activity and exercise sound even more exciting, such as:

improved sleep
more energy
reduced stress
better immunity
more self-confidence
disease prevention

You can read more about these benefits in the articles:

How to Find Time for Exercise? Most Common Excuses and Their Solutions

The above-mentioned benefits of exercise can act as a jetpack today, boosting you from the couch to the mat, a walk, or even to the gym. On the other hand, it may also happen that your spark of hope at the start gets blown out by an army of the most common excuses. Balancing lack of time and movement can then be a problem. But don’t panic, we’ll discuss below how to deal with excuses.

1. Don’t Bother Me with Exercise, I Don’t Have Time for It

If there was an ultimate book of excuses somewhere, it could easily have just 1 page with the sentence – I don’t have time. And while you don’t have time, there’s surely someone in your surroundings who manages about 10 times more than you. Then you rightfully feel like the astronauts from the movie Interstellar, who landed on a planet where 1 hour meant 10 years on Earth. The fact remains, however, that every Earthling’s day has 24 hours. The difference in what we manage and what we don’t is usually in priorities and time management. Everyone has different responsibilities, but that doesn’t change anything.

Of course, you can’t manage everything, but when we say we don’t have time for exercise, it’s often just our usual routine speaking, not wanting to let any new intruder in the form of exercise into our lives. And yet this disruption doesn’t have to turn our life upside down. Even though exercising alongside work can be challenging, sometimes it’s enough to think about how we spend our regular days after work and what could be done differently.

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Possible Reasons for Lack of Time to Exercise

So ask yourself questions about how much time you spend on, for example:

watching TV out of habit
aimlessly scrolling social media
reading internet comments
dealing with others’ lives instead of your own
procrastination
sitting in bars/cafés
overthinking
perfectionism in unimportant things (e.g., choosing a filter for a photo)
planning without action

Whether these activities are a waste of time is for you to judge, but if we look at it in terms of efficiency, some of them could at least be shortened, if not eliminated. And you might be surprised how much free time suddenly appears in your day with new time management.

Time Management and Exercise

If reflection isn’t enough, feel free to try this for a few days:

Take a paper, diary, or calendar on your mobile and write down everything you do each day. Either several main blocks of the day (work, food, leisure activities, time on mobile), or make a summary even at regular intervals, e.g., every hour
evaluate your results and try to focus on micro time-wasters (scrolling, repeated checking of mobile, email, downtime, staring at the wall, few minutes of TV hypnosis)
try to think about which activities of the day were unplanned or stole more time than appropriate and where you created a time window during which you could do something for yourself, e.g., take a 10-minute walk. Ideal moments are also while cooking dinner or during a commercial break while watching a movie, when you can do, for example, 20 squats.

The first or any other workout doesn’t have to last an hour, you can easily do just a 10-minute walk, jump rope 20 times, walk around the room for 5 minutes or do 10 squats. This few-minute session can turn into 20 minutes tomorrow or in a few days, and gradually you might work your way up to a full-fledged workout.

2. It Will Take Forever to See Results

Thinking about Superman or Wonder Woman bodies before you’ve even started is very bold at the very least. I won’t lie when I say that working on such figures requires years of hard work, self-discipline and effort on all fronts from diet through training to recovery. Let’s give up this idea for now and instead focus on the fact that the time to see the first results doesn’t have to be so long as to discourage you from the starting line.

The fact is that muscle growth starts with the very first workout, and you’ll get stronger with each subsequent one. There’s a well-known concept of so-called newbie gains, which says that beginners experience a relatively rapid increase in muscle mass and strength at the start.

Although the first visual changes may take several weeks, you can track progress in strength from workout to workout. This will practically immediately tell you that you’re on the right track. So there’s no need to worry that waiting for results would take forever. That, on the contrary, tends to take up endless planning without transitioning to action. ^[5]

3. I Don’t Want to Slave Away for an Hour in the Gym

When your couch and sedentary lifestyle have been your life’s happiness so far, it’s understandable that the thought of an hour-long workout in the gym makes you break out in a cold sweat. The perceived length of one hour is relative, and while it passes quite quickly with a favourite series, it can be discouraging with weights, especially for beginners.

Therefore, it would be good to forget about this idea. Even small steps can have a big impact and can easily take place in your living room without the stress of a new gym environment. To get started, you just need to move to action. The first steps on the wave of training don’t require any special equipment. The only criterion for how to start exercising without time at home is to have a healthy body.

Muscle growth starts with the very first workout

Then you can easily handle, for example, this 12-minute tabata workout, which will exercise your whole body. The best thing about it is that these exercises will only take a negligible amount of time from your day, after which you still have 23 hours and 48 minutes for everything else. Micro-workouts (such as an initial exercise plan for beginners) that you can do, for example, during a TV commercial break, will also serve as an inspiration.

Exercise for Busy People

If you don’t have time, your training plan can look like this:

a simple 10-minute walk
20 squats
15-minute stretching
20-minute dance
10 jump rope skips
15 minutes on the treadmill
any extra movement compared to daily routine

Micro-actions that Will Lead You to Movement

The workout itself can also be broken down into clever micro-actions, each of which gets you one step further. Examples include:

Prepare sports clothes by your bed the day before
Put on exercise clothes in the morning (it’s easier when you already have them prepared)
Play 1 motivational song and move in place (it’s easier when you already have sports clothes on)
Lay out your mat (it’s easier when you’ve warmed up before)
Set a timer for 2 minutes and do any activity: breathing, shoulder rotations, arm raises, leg raises, squats, etc.)
After 2 minutes, you’re done, and if you can do 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 more, it’s just a very generous bonus.

Because ANY ACTION is MORE THAN A PLAN! And you can find a lot of interesting inspiration for home exercises in our blog section, bodyweight exercises. Remember, the more active you are during the day, the greater results it will bring. Again, I don’t mean two-phase training in the gym, but rather using the moment and active choices. An example is that you park further from the entrance to the shopping centre or use the stairs instead of the elevator.

Pomodoro Technique

Such micro-workouts can also be excellently combined with the so-called Pomodoro timing. This is a technique based on dividing tasks into smaller 25-minute intervals, separated by 5-minute breaks. After each such interval, or pomodoro, you can do 5 squats, take a walk in the yard or around the apartment, or stretch. Various apps that will alert you when it’s time to work and when a break is coming can help you with pomodoro timing. [6]

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Conclusion: Want to Start? You Don’t Even Have to Finish Reading this Article

The perfect start is right now, and I’ll forgive you if you don’t even finish reading this article. But seriously now. When you think about how much time you’ve already spent planning without action, a 10-minute start is really a piece of cake in comparison. You don’t need any plan, just take 1 step forward. Every single minute counts, which you can be rightfully proud of after long-term planning without action.

Today is the day when that anticipated breakthrough happens, for which your body will thank you tomorrow. It will immediately start reaping the benefits of movement, leading to an improved overall quality of life, both physical and mental fitness. So, what do you say? Will you stand up now? Do your first squat? Try 5 push-ups? Whatever you’ve chosen – congratulations, you’ve just begun!

If you enjoyed this article and it helped you finally spring into action, we’d appreciate it if you shared these tips with your friends. And we’d be even more delighted to read your comments about how you feel after finally finding time and completing your first workouts.

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Sources:

[1] Yuan Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Maoshen Tian, Maoshen Tian, Jian Yang, Yue XiYue Xi – The effects of procrastination on physical activity among Chinese university students: the chain-mediated effects of time management disposition and exercise motivation – https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1433880/full

[2] Tomasz S Ligeza, Marcin Maciejczyk, Miroslaw Wyczesany, Markus Junghofer – The effects of a single aerobic exercise session on mood and neural emotional reactivity in depressed and healthy young adults: A late positive potential study – https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10078493/

[3] Ahmed, Sohel, Akter, Rahemun – Immediate effects of physical activity on motor cognitive function in healthy young adults A pre-test post-test quasi experimental study – https://journals.lww.com/sjsm/fulltext/2021/21010/immediate_effects_of_physical_activity_on_motor.3.aspx

[4] James Clear – Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals This Year – https://jamesclear.com/identity-based-habits

[5] Sydney Bueckert – New to Lifting? Here’s Why You Can Expect Massive Gains, Fast – https://honehealth.com/edge/newbie-gains/?srsltid=AfmBOoogTJW3obYcoy6fa-0fk5lAkOg5qtuwpZsaflqiLlZ1G6rHs1Ut

[6] The Pomodoro Technique – https://www.todoist.com/cs/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique