How Do I Lift Weights When I'm So Busy?

Dear Swole Woman,
I'm in my last year of a master's program that I have been doing while working full time, and looking eagerly forward to all the things I can do and try when I once again have some semblance of free time. Lifting is definitely one of those things! However, I am preemptively nervous, because three times a week seems like a reasonable commitment for something I would do for several months to a year, but I feel like with lifting you have to commit to doing it three times a week for eternity! And there are other hobbies I want to try, other classes I want to take, a social life I want to remember how to have. Also I am an elementary school teacher, which means, on the bright side, I get way more time off on weekdays than most people and have a fair amount of scheduling flexibility. But it also means that I work a lot, have an earlier bedtime than most adults, can't get to the gym midday on a workday, and there are some periods of time where I will absolutely be working late every day for weeks at a time (the rush of September set-up, the lead-up to conferences, etc.). I don't feel this way about the concept of working out generally, because as one of the running weirdos it's something I can do with basically zero commute time. But man, I know you keep talking about how the actual workout does not take that long at all, but the commute really adds up when you're someone who regularly has maybe three hours between leaving work and starting to get ready to turn in.

So, like... is swoleness not for those with sporadically intense schedules? What happens if you've been lifting for like eight months and then you have to stop for six weeks? Can you take breaks without ruining everything? Once you've been adjusted for a while is it OK to sometimes only go twice a week? Am I just being a baby?

-Natalia

You are…perhaps being a baby, but an eminently normal baby. I’ve never been able to figure out what it is about going to the gym that going once comes with the crushing enormity of committing to going every day week in and week out for the rest of your entire life. We all really get ahead of ourselves about this, and I’m not sure why that is, especially when the best way to start is super small and saying you will just go once, and not overdo it, and get used to it slowly.

So here is the thing: Exercise and working out should be part of a lifestyle, as opposed to, say, a thing you use to nearly murder yourself in the eight weeks leading up to the summer and then never again until your next vacation or summer rolls around. But the beauty of a lifestyle thing is that it can ebb and flow without substantially affecting your overall fitness or health. I’ve written before about how even the world’s best athletes take months or years off their training, and not that I’m a world-class athlete, but I take a few weeks off at a time a couple times a year, too. When work gets intense, when you go on vacation, etc., even when you just get sick of what you’re doing, taking time off is normal and healthy. Who will come after you, the police? You just won’t be as strong when you come back, but this is, again, normal and healthy. The hidden benefit of coming back after time off is that’s a great time to focus on form and quality of your reps, rather than trying to push weights to the limit.

As for your schedule, you are doing a lot right now; training to the degree of building strength is tough to do when you are working two jobs, or one and a half jobs (I know this firsthand). It’s not impossible, but most people who do it are pretty regimented and great time managers and have made it work—most importantly—through a lot of intelligent trial and error and slowly fitting the pieces together. When something works, like meal prepping on Sunday afternoons after a gym session, they commit to doing that; if going to the gym on Thursdays never works out, they try a different day; if they can’t fit in a whole workout in a single session, they’ll split it into morning and evening on the same day.

However, early nights and a commute to and from the gym shouldn’t be the death of your training. A solid starter lifting program requires three training days per week—training only two days per week will work you out but won’t make you any stronger. So, three days a week it is, and if one of those days is a weekend day, that’s only two days during your workweek. If you can get to the gym right after your work it is over, it probably won’t even be crowded. I know commuting is not fun but it adds, what, an hour total? That is 0.5 percent of your week. Not even one whole percent. If the idea of that much lost time bothers you that much, find an educational podcast or get into audiobooks to listen to in the car. I know everyone’s busy but I think the vast majority of our sanities or ability to make something work don’t turn on a single hour.

I know it’s tempting to try to cram exercise into your life edgewise; I spent too long in my life being one of those people who hoped taking the stairs instead of the escalator or doing little 10-minute circuits in my living room and so forth would satisfy me. But the benefits of actually giving it room and (limited, reasonable) priority in my life have gone so far beyond my health. Lifting gives me something concrete I can check off when nothing else in my life is moving; it completely occupies my brain for an hour so I don’t worry about other things; and it gives me a framework for really taking care of myself in every aspect of life, getting enough sleep and eating right so I can lift. Being strong also makes everything about the physicality of life so much easier, so when those moments arise that I have to carry groceries or move something, I’m not helpless. It is actually fun to be the go-to person in your office for changing the water cooler tank, and I maintain anyone who is threatened by this is not worth trying to impress anyway.

Maybe you really can’t do it! This is up to you, and the important thing is for you to decide this is a valuable use of your time. Per the commitment talk above, a good thing to do might be to commit to doing a strength training program for a block of time that’s long enough to feel the effects, like 12 weeks. (Strong Curves, New Rules of Lifting for Women, and Thinner Leaner Stronger are all quite popular right now; for simplicity and a focus on strength over aesthetics, my personal favorite is StrongLifts). Twelves weeks is about the time it will take to feel like it’s easier to pick stuff up, or bend down, or carry things around thanks to all your training. People will start to ask to feel your biceps, and completing your last set of squats will make a bad day completely fade into the background. From there, you can assess whether it’s something that fits in your life, or whether some small adjustments might make it work even better. But before you get spooked by the lifetime commitment, give yourself a chance at loving it.

All Exercise is Bad

This is really only adjacent to being swole: when … do you go to the gym? Like, literally what hours of the day/week? How do you do it regularly? Prioritizing a form of exercise that serious, that you have to do that regularly is very daunting to me as a non-exerciser. — Nozlee

Personally, I go in the middle of the day, like as my lunch break, because I can. When I don’t go then, I go in the morning before work, which is when a lot of people go when they don’t have time otherwise. Plenty of people go after work but my gym is a zoo then, so if it gets past 3:30pm and I haven’t gone yet, then fuck that — I will go the next day. I know you say going “THAT regularly” is intimidating but if you don’t need a rigid routine in order to stick with something, the actual days you go can be pretty fluid. Sometimes I go earlier in the week, sometimes later, sometimes a couple days in a row, sometimes they’re spread out.

Going from not doing much to sticking to a tight, intense schedule would be daunting in any respect, not just for working out. My enthusiasm for working out comes and goes; sometimes I’m super-pumped to go, and decide I’m so excited I’m gonna become a columnist about it, and then months will go by where I’d rather surgically remove my own eye. I have a number of mental tricks I use on myself to get myself to show up regularly.

Tell yourself you won’t do much.

Put on all your gym clothes and be like, “I will do one exercise (e.g., squats) and see how I feel, and if I feel bad, I’ll go home.” When I do this I almost always end up finishing the workout because I am already there and sweaty.

Tell yourself it’s only an hour (or 30 minutes, or 20 minutes, or whatever).

This is such a small amount of time in the scope of your day. This sort of dovetails with the above; you can do anything for 20 minutes.

Tell yourself you’ll feel better after.

I think anyone will tell you even if you feel like shit, you will not feel worse after a workout.

Tell yourself you’ll feel better in your life.

I’m going to speak for everyone and say no one does exercise… for the exercise. All exercise is fundamentally bad. No one lifts weights because they love struggling awkwardly in weird positions, or feeling like they could be crushed at any moment, or sweating, or making their veins pop out of their neck and forehead. No one runs because they love putting one foot in front of the other for mile after mile or breathing really hard. It’s always hard; if it’s not hard you’re not exercising. People exercise because in the seconds, minutes, days, weeks following, you feel a different kind of good for each of those time increments. You feel accomplished, the good kind of tired, stronger, more coordinated, more agile, more flexible, even day to day, just picking stuff up or going up stairs. What you do in the long term matters — you can’t make excuses every day — but just for today, showing up and doing the thing will be enough. You don’t have to crush every movement and throw 45lb-plates around like frisbees and do handstand pushups while screaming the national anthem in order to get the benefits of a workout. If you’re just getting started, showing up is more than enough. Get used to showing up first before you expect anything of yourself, and build slowly.

Do other things!

Workout boredom is real. Change the movements you’re doing, or do some other exercise for a while. You don’t have to fully abandon what you were doing before, but maybe scale it back in favor of trying some new things. In fact, and I will get into this into a future column, you can’t be *optimally* fit by aggressively pursuing just one aspect, e.g., strength. Good lifters must be quite flexible; good runners are usually pretty strong; you’re not a good yogi if you can’t breathe heavily in downward dog for minutes at a time.

At the end of the day, it’s not that big a deal. The beauty of becoming one of these annoying fitness people who appear to work out all the time (but they don’t, honestly) is that working out becomes the rule of your life, not the exception. And when it’s not the exception, having to skip a workout here and here, or push it back a day or a week, or even a few months, it’s fine, because you always know you’ll be back. People get injured and have to take months off. Pros take years off sometimes, just for the hell of it! If you can push through the rule/exception inflection point, this won’t be the tough part anymore. And pushing through that involves doing some of the stuff above so you get a chance to see the benefits of working out build on themselves and pay off in the rest of your life.

But you may just need to choose. A sort of odd meme I’ve seen traded around people who lift is a rephrasing of “I can’t do [x, y, z] because I don’t have time, I don’t have energy, it’s too hard to get to the gym and back, etc etc” into “I can’t do [x, y, z] because it’s not a priority for me.” You do this to see how it sounds to you, the idea being that, if it is a priority, your excuses are weak. I see what they’re doing; it feels a little privileged because truly, not everyone can work out. Exercise, as a priority, can’t compete with paying your rent.

Physical health is important, but it doesn’t need to be a full-bore effort for your entire life span. At some points in your life you may have more time; at other points you may have less. You don’t need to work out a lot in order to get some benefits. But if you are interested in becoming a very fit person and don’t lead a life of leisure, or are actually very busy, you will have to choose it. You may have to choose sticking to a drink or two rather than getting wasted on a Saturday because you only made it to the gym one other time this week and have to go tomorrow; if you work 12-hour days because you’re used to being a go-getter, three of those days might have to be 11-hour days. I know. I know. It’s scary. But do it for your muscles.