When sports teams are ramping up for the season, they sometimes do what are known as “2-a-days” — that is, two practices a day. This is often associated with football, though the NFL stopped doing them a while ago. Two regular practices a day would just be twice as grueling as one, which might not help with the cause of starting the season injury free.
However, the concept of exercising twice a day has some merit — especially if you approach it right. Sometimes people assume they need to exercise for a long time or it’s not worth it. Or they think they only have time for one kind of exercise in life — but then that gets boring.
Two-a-days can switch things up.
So, for instance, maybe you go for a 25-minute run in the morning and then do a 15-minute strength training session at night after your kids go to bed. That’s 40 minutes of activity, but you didn’t need a 40-minute chunk of time to do it.
Or maybe you can do a 15-minute yoga video over your lunch break, and then you swim laps for 20 minutes during your kid’s 30-minute swim lesson at night. The lesson isn’t long enough to cover a long workout, but it can cover something, and you can do something different at a different point to get yourself up over 30 minutes a day.
Any exercise is better than no exercise. That said, I know some people find it hard to believe that 20 minutes will do much. And yes, if you’re training for a marathon, you’ll need to find longer stretches. But my experience is that people have a lot more 20-minute chunks during the day than they have hour-long chunks. If you think exercise requires an hour, there may be a lot of days when you don’t exercise.
If you start trying to use bits of time though, you might exercise more days. And by trying different things, you keep from getting bored. Running 40 minutes on a treadmill can feel tedious. Twenty might feel like it’s not that long — and then you do something else for another 20 minutes. Or maybe you even run for 20 minutes on that treadmill in the morning, go about your day, and run for another 20 minutes at night. Neither felt so long but it still totaled 40.
In any case, I’ve been doing this some days this summer. I will sometimes run in the mornings, but I really don’t want to get up that early. So I run for about 30 minutes and then often do something later: a bike ride, kicking back and forth in the pool, a strength training session. Occasionally I even run, bike, and swim in one day! It’s not a real triathlon by any means but there are a lot of days when it all fits.
Have you ever listened to NPR’s Body Electric podcast? It’s all about movement and they did one episode about how it was actually more beneficial in many ways to do sporadic exercise throughout the day, versus just in one chunk. This has. made me take random walks around the block a lot more!
@Elisa- I haven’t listened to it, but I’ve definitely read some articles suggesting that might be the case. Certainly sitting for long periods of time isn’t great, even if you spend an hour a day doing something else. I’ve been trying to take active breaks too!
Love this advice, and I’ll have to check out that podcast, Elisa. This was my approach for a few years with babies and toddlers while working full time. I’m glad to be in a phase with predictable scheduling and full nights of sleep, but the fragmented exercise times worked!
@Amanda- yep, sometimes time is in short supply. I’m going to be training for a half marathon this fall so definitely will need some longer stretches but the short ones are good too.
It works best if the exercise isn’t too strenuous, or there are no more meetings. Unfortunately I am expected to look put together for those, which is incompatible with anything other than a wee bit of lifting or yoga.