The Time to Exercise

Andy Round is a successful business man in his early forties. He has taken two companies on separate occasions from obscurity to the relative limelight with careful planning, meticulous execution and hard work, dollops of it. In his spare time, Andy runs, a lot.

“At the moment I am running around one hundred and twenty kilometers a week”, Andy says. On the 9th of April, he is running his first marathon in Canberra.

The Heart Foundation of Australia recommends thirty minutes of moderate exercise five times a week. Research by Dr Joseph Mercola at Brown University in the US has recently suggested this should be sixty minutes. Everyone agrees any exercise is better that no exercise but how does someone like Andy find the time?

And it is not just the exercise time itself. There is the time to work out the training programme, in this case the specific goal of finishing a marathon. There is time to work out the diet, the time to breakdown the individual components of the diet to ensure he will be in his best shape for the event and will have the resources available in his body to complete his task. Running at this level means he needs new shoes every nine to ten weeks, something else to add to the list of things to do as these are not just walk in walk out type running shoes.

“I usually drink around 300mls of half strength Gatorade prior to running. If I run and hour I do not take any fluid breaks but on finishing I will drink 1000 to 1200mls of Gatorade within thirty minutes of finishing with another 600mls an hour later”

If Andy runs for longer the regimen is changed as far as drinking during the race.

“If I run for one to two hours, I do as I always do but drink water at one hour with a carbohydrate loaded gel. For two to three hours, water with carbohydrate loaded gel at the hour, then 500mls of Gatorade the hour after that. Over three hours I drink water throughout the run, carbohydrate loaded gels every hour and two 600ml bottles of Gatorade between the second and third hour. I finish as usual but will keep drinking as required until my urine runs clear.”

This sounds rather technical and has taken Andy some time to find a pattern that works for him.

He expounds: ”In the beginning I used to feel awful as I was not sure of what I was trying to do, my feet hurt as I had the wrong shoes, it was a real effort”

Andy was never an athlete at school. His sporting prowess was limited to playground soccer. With his business life, his striving for success meant he did what so many have done and continue to do. He ran, but to fat.

Andy elaborates” I was spending many works at work, eating poorly, no exercise, all the usual sins and I was carrying with me the equivalent of a large dog! I was forty kilograms heavier than I am now and I still have another five kilograms to reach my target weight of seventy five kilos”.

What tipped Andy onto the fitness trail was tiredness. “ I wasn't performing as well as I wanted to at work and I had no energy when I got home for my family. It didn't take a brain surgeon to work out I needed to spend some time on my body”.

But how to find the time? Thirty minutes five times a week as stated by the Heart Foundation is a minimum figure. The revision of this to an hour is again a recommended minimum. However a Welsh sports company Esporta recommend once a week rather than five based on the fact the times for exercise thrown at people are demotivating. Any exercise must be attainable and maintainable.

In the case of Andy, he was wanting to lose weight as well. He researched all of the diets and there are plenty of them, all with different ideas. But as Andy says, “ The idea that you can eat bacon and eggs for breakfast everyday, all the cheese in the world, stacks of meat with lashings of whipped cream as long as you don't eat carbs is ridiculous and in my case as a runner it would be dangerous”.

So how did Andy find his way through the maze of opinions and jargon and find the time to exercise?

“I hired a personal trainer to start me off. They did not last long as I did not need them after the one jewel they gave me. Most recommendations feel like a sentence, what you can't have or what you must do. The advice was if I was genuine in my desire to be better and want to continue to be better, I had to make a lifestyle change. And that was it, my attitude to it all changed. I adopted my changes positively and the idea I could not have chocolate or cake or something never entered my head from then on”.

I asked Andy about his weight loss programme. “ In the end you have to use more energy than you consume and have as many colors of food on your plate to get a balanced diet. It is that simple!”.

Andy has succeeded by not making his success a goal. By not establishing targets that he could fail at, he simply changed the way he did things to set up a new lifestyle that he wanted based pretty much on common sense. Whilst his running might be extreme for some, it was where he ended up because he was enjoying the lifestyle.