Walk at Home

Can 10 Minutes Really Be the Solution?

Are you too busy to exercise? You only need 10 minutes!

“Lack of time,” is the cited as the number one reason people stop exercising.  Do you fall in this category as well?  The Surgeon General’s fitness report recommends at least 30 minutes of exercise, 5 days a week?  For most of us, that’s asking more than we can handle.  Our lives are busy. Full time jobs, raising children, and household chores take up the majority of our time.  How, then, are we to fit regular workouts into the mix?  We must change our way of thinking. Remember, when it comes to exercise, a little goes a long way!

You have more time in an average day than you realize. Figure out where you can substitute inactivity with activity.  Harold Kohl from the CDC states, “Think about exercise the way you think about substituting low-fat food for high-fat food. The key is to look for opportunities to be active in ways that aren’t necessarily planned.”

Ways you can substitute inactivity with activity:

1. Turn your “Downtime” into Activity Time! Opportunities for activity appear everywhere.  When you get the mail, walk: don’t drive.  While watching your kids play soccer; get up and walk a few laps!  There are lots of easy ways to sneak in some exercise.  Before you know it, the minutes really add up.


2. Take mini walks! If you wait until you have long periods of time during the day for exercise, it may not happen! Divide your goal into mini walks: three 10 minute walks, six 5 minute jogs, or even fifteen 2-minute sprints.  Studies show that you burn the same number of calories whether you exercise all at once or in short bursts.  Little chunks of brisk walking may even be better.  Short, quick workouts cause your body to burn calories because they rev your metabolism higher and more steadily throughout the day.


3. Try Interval Training.   No need to set up expensive equipment in your house or trek to the gym.  Arrange simple and effective workouts that fit into your life.  Once you find a 10- minute window, rotate through different activities. Pop in one our DVDs for a few minutes, pause it, do a few ab crunches. Go back to the DVD, pause it, do a few reps of bicep curls.  Now that’s effective! 



Interval training is so powerful!  In a recent study, women who exercised 3 days a week for 20 minutes, alternating between fast and moderate paced intervals, lost 5 times as much weight as women who exercised 3 days a week for 40 minutes at a steady, brisk speed.  Even better, the interval exercisers shed most of the fat from their legs and belly.