The Balanced Life – Time Management

How do you fit the right workouts and the right meals into a busy schedule?

• Clearly identify your goals. When I did this I was able to plan more clearly and in turn fit much more into my day. Clear goals keep you focused, they also allow you to see how you’ve progressed. Visibly seeing your success will help you big time. Writing down clearly defined goals helped me realize what I was doing wrong and when I made the changes I needed to make, they helped me see the proof of my success.

Write down both short and long term goals and keep them measurable.

• Whether you’re trying to lose fat, gain muscle or both, you have to plan your week out! Winging it won’t work.
  

For both gaining weight and losing it, you should be getting in 5-6 meals a day. Each meal should have a portion of protein and a portion of whole carbs or veggies, or both if you can fit them in. If you’re trying to gain weight your meals should be much bigger.

You don’t have to continually be counting calories, but to get an idea of how many you’re taking in each day try the google calorie counter. I’ll use this every now and then just to check up on my diet and make sure I’m getting enough calories each day.

Before I started planning out my meals I’d get stuck buying something quick to eat that was high enough in calories to cover a meal, but didn’t have the same nutritional value as a well balanced meal would. These high calorie snacks are the worst! They’ve got very little nutritional value and are full of empty, useless calories. So try planning your meals. It’ll do wonders for your diet, your goals and your health.

• Along with planning your meals, get into the routine of working out at the same time every week. If you work out at 12 pm on a Monday, then work out at the same time the following Monday.

This gets you in the right frame of mind to get what you need to get done in the gym. It will also keep you from missing workouts that you’d miss if they aren’t planned into your weekly routine.

• Start shortening and intensifying your workouts.

If your goal is to gain muscle, you want to break down the muscle as much as you can in the least amount of time as possible. This was big for me. I went from lifting for 1.5 hours 5x per week to no more than 45 minutes 4x per week and it did wonders.

If you’re trying to lose fat and get toned keep in mind that interval training is the best cardio to burn fat. So, why not keep the same principles with your weight training or body weight training as well?

Try circuits. Make them as intense and possible then rest for 60 seconds. The more fit you become, the longer and more difficult the circuits should be. Bodyweight workouts are sometimes the hardest when you put a bunch of them into a circuit.

This will allow you to burn much more calories than normal weight training, it will also allow you to shorten your workouts.

I’ve found that I need a routine. My schedule’s too busy to not have a plan. I’m still putting on lean mass and have found that I work best when I have a meal 45-60 minutes before a workout, a shake with protein + greens + carbs within 15 minutes after a workout, then another meal and hour or two after that.

As my work schedule began to get busier and busier I felt overwhelmed, planning my week on the Saturday or Sunday helped me fit everything I needed to get done into that week. I was able to get my workouts in, eat healthier, get more rest and have a whole lot more fun, energy, and free time as well.

Feeling unhealthy and out of shape is no fun. The more your workouts become a routine part of your life, the more energy you’ll have, the healthier you’ll be, the more successful you’ll be both in work and in your social life.

So give it a shot and GOOD LUCK!