I have been a manager at the county for about 10 years. I have two kids at home who are in high school and my husband works. Our lives are very busy. My oldest can drive so thankfully I no longer have to take both kids to school. But I have to pack work, athletics, my own exercise, cooking dinner and household chores into my full days. If I were giving a friend advice, I would say cut something out, but it’s hard to see what could go.
My individual action plan choice
I’m doing the WebMD online program and I’m using the exercise planner. I’m a pretty goal oriented person and I like having some measure of accountability to get in my exercise. My strategy is to look at what I do to see if I can get exercise credit for it. I’ve been pleased to see that I can get exercise points for vacuuming and gardening and I even got a pedometer so I can get credit for all of the walking I do between meetings. Killing two birds with one stone is the name of the game so if I can use gardening to check off something on my home list AND my Healthy IncentivesSM list, that’s a good use of time. I find that on the weekends I usually do some kind of activity around the house I can get exercise credit for and during the week I am walking around enough between meetings that I can use the walking planner. I have even found that I look for opportunities during the week to get in extra steps so I can beat my last record for total steps taken during the day.
Why this works for me
I like the exercise planner because the pull down list has all sorts of activities I had never thought of as exercise and gives me good ideas for what I can do to work exercise in during my day. I always thought of an exercise routine as doing the same thing on the same day of the week at the same time. That just doesn’t work in my life. Now, I realize I can do lots of different things during the day to get my heart rate up for a period of time.
Other people this might work for
Anyone who does a lot of work around the house on weekends but is very busy during the week.
Anyone who is always on the go and active, but doesn’t have time to go to the gym.
Tips for success
Make sure you start your program before April 23rd if you need to skip any week for vacation, etc.
Find new exercises by clicking on the orange box with the white question mark beside an exercise to see a short video of how to do it.
