Lack of time is one of the main barriers that crops up time and again when trying to get fit and remain healthy. The government’s weekly guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise along with strength exercises sounds like a lot! However, when you think that your weeks contains over 10,000 minutes those guidelines are a very small percentage of time.

With daily stressors and ‘to do lists’ at an all time high, fitting your exercise in can be difficult. But fear not! Gone are the days of having to spend 60 minutes exercising or in the gym to gain your exercise points. Let me talk you through how to gain just as much from a shorter time frame.

HIIT
Interval training has been covered a lot within the media and in research lately, signifying its importance. High intensity interval training is a form of training which involves short bursts (20-30 seconds) of high intensity activity, pushing your maximum heart rate up to around 80%, or an intensity in which you cannot hold a conversation in! This is followed by a period of lower intensity exercise (60-90 seconds), and then you repeat generally 5-20 times. With this type of training you can work your heart and your muscles hard in a reduced time frame. This can be done within the gym on a machine such as the exercise bike or rower, or just as easily without any equipment; running on the spot or performing star jumps.

Back to basics
As babies and toddlers we would often spend time on the floor, rolling, crawling and squatting down. However, once we can stand upright and walk tall we seem to forget about those simple movements, which as it turns out provide really effective stimuli for the body to move as one. Spending 10 minutes reconnecting all four limbs on the floor, stretching and rolling into various movements, will provide some great sensory feedback to your nervous system and over time can improve movement.

Walk and talk
When at work or socialising we so often sit down in meeting rooms or cafés to chat and figure things out, but that shouldn’t be the case. Add movement to your meetings to increase your exercise – that extra movement may even stimulate new brain waves, which come from the body shunting more blood around! Likewise, get your coffee ‘to go’ when meeting friends, take a hike so you can log those extra steps and find a use for the extra caffeine!

Little and often
Far too often it is thought that exercise must be done in a block time of 30-90 minutes consistently, and that outside of this there isn’t any point because you won’t reap the benefits. This is far from true. Actually, fitting in shorter exercise intervals throughout the day could be more effective, consistently increasing the heart rate and boosting metabolism, therefore burning calories.

This often makes it easier to fit physical activity in, not being constrained to a time. Try 10 minutes in the morning of core exercises, a 15 minute brisk walk or HIIT session before eating lunch, then a good 10 minutes of back to basics floor work in the afternoon or evening to mobilise. Performing this type of exercise 3-4 times per week will get you well on your way to those 150 minutes, then the weekend provides 2880 minutes to perhaps get a longer bout of physical activity in!