WEIGHT LOSS WEDNESDAYS: EXERCISING WHEN YOU CAN’T GET TO THE GYM

I’m very good at coming up with “good” excuses as to why I can’t go to the gym to workout. I’m too tired after work. I had a late lunch and it’s too soon to exercise. I just walked the dog. It’s too late to go (which is extra silly since it’s a 24-hour gym). My point isn’t that I need to go to the gym more (although I do), but that you don’t need workout at the gym to get some exercise. There are a lot of other options you can choose to get your exercise in every day.

Take a Walk

The first and easiest option is to just go outside and walk. I take my dog for a walk every day, so I count that as 15-20 minutes of my exercise time for the day. Even if you don’t have a dog, you can just go outside and take a nice walk for half an hour or so. You don’t need any fancy shoes or gym equipment – you can just walk! It’s easy.

Go Back to School

Sometimes when I’m feeling motivated (yet not motivated enough to go to the gym to work out), I go to the school near our house. It has an outdoor track that I’ll walk/run on. Some schools may lock up their track or have rules about using it after hours, but I think for the most part it’s pretty easy to find a track you can run on. I even bring Petey with me sometimes. (He’s actually a pretty good runner for a little pug.) Most schools will also have outdoor jungle gym equipment you can make use of, such as pull-up bars, monkey bars, etc. Get creative and you can get a really good workout in!

Stay In

On the opposite end of the spectrum, why not stay home and try some indoors exercise? There are many good exercise programs now on DVD, such as Zumba, 8-minute abs, etc. Or if you don’t want to commit to buying something you might only use once, a lot of TV channels have exercise programs early in the morning that you can DVR (or do live if you’re an early riser). There are also a lot of good fitness programs for the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Kinect. We have a few, but unfortunately there’s not enough room in our living room to move around and do them.

I hope this has given you some new options for exercising. Do you have any other exercise ideas? What’s your favorite way to exercise outside of the gym?