Can you spare 2% of your time? 1%?

If you're new to 1-Minute Nutrition, welcome!...and I encourage you to check out our previous posts.

Today, let's diverge from nutrition for a moment and visit its more attractive partner...exercise.

The average American spends:

33% of their week sleeping

24% of their week at work

17% of their week watching TV

9% of their week on Social Media

3% of their time driving to work and

1% of their time..wait for it...going to the bathroom.

Those stats are crazy to me. And they tell me that time should never be an excuse for not exercising.

Spending 2% of your week exercising amounts to 180 minutes a week. 3 hours. That’s well above the health and fitness industry’s recommendation of 150 minutes a week.

Spending 1% of your week amounts to 90 minutes. In a huge study of over 400,000 people, they found just 90 minutes of exercise per week extends lifespan an average of 3 years, and decreases our chance of dying from disease by 14%.

Seems worth it to me.

If we can’t devote the same amount of time to exercising as we do to going to the bathroom, something is off. Especially when exercising:

• Increases energy

• Reduces stress

• Improves mood

• Reduces the risk of chronic disease

• Improves memory and brain function

• And so on and so on and so on

As much as we want to, we cannot use time as an excuse. So what does get in our way?

Let’s look at 3 common stumbling blocks:

Energy - We don’t exercise because, ironically, we don’t have the energy. Ironically, because exercising energizes you.

So...could you exercise before you’ve expended all of your energy? Could you exercise when you’re tired, knowing it will increase your energy?

Priority - We don’t prioritize exercise. If we can’t give it 1% of our time, it’s just not a priority.

What could move down your priority list so that exercise could move up?

We Don’t Feel Like It - There’s going to be times we just don’t feel like exercising. Probably lots of times.

Can you become the type of person who does it anyway? It doesn’t have to be your best workout, but if we commit to it...let’s honor that commitment.

So what’s your percentage? 1 percent? 2 percent? More?

Let’s give exercise its share of our 100%...1 minute at a time.