As a busy professional, wasting time in the gym to develop your physical fitness for your sporting and health aspirations is just not an option. This article addresses the common concerns of the corporate athlete and provides advice on getting the best out of your time in the gym.
OK, so you don’t have the time to train…
I understand, everything else just seems to get in your way. Your work, your home life, your social life. The thing that often gets missed is your physical fitness training and training specifically for your sport.
Why is it that the one thing that can make such a difference to your OVERALL well being gets cut out… It seems that it is always the after thought.
Time is a very precious commodity, once it has gone it cannot be reclaimed, got back or reversed! As a busy professional, you are by definition “busy”.
You are busy with work commitments, busy doing “busy stuff” that takes up huge proportions of your time, you have a busy social life associated to your work life, networking is key to your career progression and professional standing.
This problem affects corporate athletes of all levels. If you are an aspiring Olympic athlete, but NEED a career as well working to supplement your sport. Or, you are a weekend golfer, rugby or soccer player who happens to be a Director, VP or CEO of a multinational company, the restrictions on your time are the same.
If only you had more time to train, your game could be that little bit better, taking you to club, regional or national championship level! The ultimate cost of this show-stopper is lost opportunities to fully enjoy your sport. It will leave you with too many “if-only” and “what-if” questions later in life.
Also the opportunity for social and professional networking is lost too. This means missed business or promotion opportunities, because you don’t play golf, or the rest of the management team play for the local soccer or rugby team and you don’t.
However, your perception of how much time a training program actually takes may be slightly off the mark… and it really does not need to eat into your work commitments, social commitments, or your home life.
Gone are the days of ineffective, slow, bring cardio workouts requiring you to spend hours on the treadmill, or pounding the pavement early each morning, or late every night. Studies have shown that this is largely pointless for the majority of sports, and in many cases detrimental to your overall physical health.
Such training can very quickly cause repetitive strain injuries, structural health problems, specifically ankle, knee and hip joint problems as well as being an influencing factor in back pain.
What’s more, this style of training has been shown to be as much as 9 times LESS effective for fat burning than other methods that take a fraction of the time!
Workouts can be much more focussed, getting you further towards your health and fitness goals can be done in a fraction of the time, leaving “Time” to be a POOR excuse rather than a legitimate reason for not training.
So what kind of training am I talking about, what can you do in a short time that will be effective for your sporting as well as health related goals?
OK, lets put it this way, if you are on the gym floor for more than 45 minutes, you are probably wasting an awful lot of time chatting, or doing exercises that really don’t achieve an awful lot.
Exercise routines that focus on more “bang for your buck” movements and intensities.
For example, stay away from the machines, they “isolate” individual muscles and can cause muscular imbalances and have little reflection on how you use your body during your game.
Don’t waste your time on doing a million reps of abdominal crunches, bicep curls, tricep extensions or calf raises. They do very little for you in the overall scheme of your training, and are a massive waste of time where the muscles can be utilised during other exercises anyway.
The exercises to focus on working the large muscle groups, use movement patterns that reflect your sport and work to massively boost your metabolism. We are talking Squats, Lunges, Deadlifts, rows, and push ups…
Learning to do each of these fundamental exercises will massively reduce your time in the gym, give you a really effective workout for fat burning and improving your sporting ability.
A keen water skier who is also works as a legal consult in a very busy bank here in Luxembourg, discovered that getting her workouts done in under 40 minutes meant that she never entertained the fact of missing a workout, the time issue never became an issue. Even after a few short months with this renewed focus on exercises that really made the difference, she had lost weight, dropped a clothing size and saw massive gains in her skiing performance too.
So you can see that there really is no need to waste time doing all your long slow cardio workouts. The biggest question for you now, is with time no longer a valid excuse, you really cannot miss your workouts anymore!
Go to the Gym tomorrow and try out the basic moves, if you don’t know how to do them, there are plenty of explanations all over the internet, or you can contact an experienced personal trainer to help you.
Take action today and don’t waste another minute of your time!
