How exercise gives you extra time

Hi SparkFriends

Today I had a conversation with my 14-year-old son that I'd like to share with you.

He is passionate about video editing and would like to attend film school some day. He does a great job learning new programs and practicing in his spare time.

Naturally I want to use the SparkPeople program to help him reach his goals. So I talked to him today about one of my favorite fitness tricks.

One of the biggest excuses I hear from people for why they don't consistently exercise is that "it takes too much time."

This is not true if you design a fitness program the right way and then do it consistently.

I can show this is the case in a single day for many people.

If you sit much of the day or don't get much overall activity, over time your productivity will typically drop as you get fatigued mentally. This is especially true sitting in front of a computer, doing a large amount of studying, or many other types of activities.

But if you instead get up and take fitness breaks throughout the day, then your productivity can pop back up because of the mental break. And I often do my best thinking while exercising because you are free to use your brain in a different way. This point is almost like extra credit for my assertion :). As a result of taking this break to increase your productivity, that means that in this single day unit the benefits of exercise are likely to be about "even" if not greater than zero by taking the break.

So in this single day, exercise didn't take time, it was either even or you may have even come out ahead by doing exercise. Even if you lost a little time in this single day, the concept stil applies.

Next, most people never exercise consistently for a long enough time period to experience the true benefits of consistent fitness in making so many areas of life easier.

This means if you carry out that single day unit to a week, month, year, decade, or even a lifetime, then that small investment that you make in the single day unit may honestly become the best investment in your lifetime.

You will:

• Be more productive and reach many goals in life
• Have more fun
• Be likely to eat better. I find that consistent exercisers who are also mindful of their eating have an easier time eating healthy foods. I intentionally include the "mindful about eating" clause because many exercisers think that because of their exercise they can eat what they want. This thinking typically catches up with them at some point.
• Be less likely to contract "lifestyle choice diseases"

I once gave a speech to a group of MBA students at Santa Clara University and said, "Using a program like SparkPeople will help you more than you realize in all areas of life. Not using one could hurt your health and goal potential more than you realize. The choice is yours."

This is one of my all-time favorite lessons because of the incredibly large difference it can make on your life!

All of this is one of the biggest reasons for the design of my 10+ fitness minutes program that is specifically designed to help anyone stay consistent while getting great results.

I hope so much that my kids will listen and follow me on this lesson and I honestly hope the same for all of you.

If you'd like to learn more, take a look at the lessons in my Small Goals Commitment Challenge.

Chris "SparkGuy" Downie



Chris (SparkGuy)

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