Time for training: fitting fitness into a seventy-hour week
Four hours of training a week are enough to meet and exceed the World Health Organization's recommendations, and they represent 2.4% of the 168 hours a week contains. For someone working seventy hours and sleeping seven hours a night, about fifty hours remain: training takes less than a tenth of them. The difficulty is therefore not arithmetic. It is that training has no deadline and no one waiting, so it yields to everything that has. The people who train consistently in very demanding roles do a small number of things alike: they fix the sessions in the diary as appointments, usually early in the morning, they make them short, they tie them to another person, and they have a reduced version ready for the weeks when the full one is impossible. Consistency over years matters far more than the content of any week.
Your week, in hours
A week has 168 hours. Enter where yours go, and what you want to give to training.
- Hours left in the week
- 28
- Training as a share of the week
- 2.4%
- Training as a share of what is left
- 14%
The arithmetic
A week has 168 hours. Take a demanding case.
- Work: 70 hours.
- Sleep: 49 hours, at seven a night.
- Commuting and travel: 7 hours.
- Meals, family, the rest of life: what remains.
That leaves 42 hours. A programme of two strength sessions and two aerobic sessions, forty to sixty minutes each, takes four. The calculator above runs the same sum on your own figures.
The World Health Organization's minimum is lower still: 150 minutes of moderate activity and two short strength sessions, about three and a half hours, of which part can be brisk walking already present in the day. See how much exercise per week.
Why it does not happen anyway
Time is rarely the real constraint. Three other things are.
- No one is waiting. A meeting has other people in it. A training session cancelled inconveniences nobody.
- Decisions are expensive. By the evening of a long day, the capacity to choose the harder option is low. A session that depends on a decision at 7 pm depends on the worst moment.
- All-or-nothing thinking. If the planned hour is impossible, the session is dropped, when twenty minutes would have preserved the habit.
Each has a remedy that is organisational, not motivational.
1. Put it in the diary as an appointment
Sessions that exist only as intentions lose to anything with a time attached. Enter them as recurring appointments, visible to whoever manages your diary, with the same status as a client meeting. Moving one should require the same justification.
Tell your assistant, explicitly, that these are not free slots.
2. Train early
The early morning is the only part of the day that other people have not yet claimed. A session at 6.30 is rarely displaced by a call; one at 6 pm frequently is.
It requires going to bed earlier, which is the real price. Trading sleep for training is a poor exchange: below seven hours, the session costs more than it gives. See sleep for executives.
If mornings are impossible, lunchtime is the second most defensible slot. Evenings are the least.
3. Make it short and close
A sixty-minute session with thirty minutes of travel each way is a two-hour commitment. A forty-minute session in your building or at home is forty-five minutes.
- Train where you live or work.
- Keep the kit packed and visible.
- Prefer sessions that need no setup. See short, hard workouts.
Distance is one of the main reasons a gym membership goes unused.
4. Involve another person
An appointment with someone else is kept. This is the plainest reason coaches produce results: at 6.25 someone is at the door. A training partner or a regular game of padel has the same effect.
For people whose entire day consists of obligations to others, it is slightly absurd and entirely true that the session survives only when it becomes one more.
5. Have a minimum version
Decide in advance what the reduced week looks like, so that a bad week reduces training and does not end it.
- Full week: two strength, two aerobic sessions. Four hours.
- Heavy week: two sessions of thirty minutes, one of each kind, and a daily walk. Ninety minutes.
- Impossible week: fifteen minutes of bodyweight work twice, and walking. See the hotel room workout.
The rule is never to miss twice in a row.
6. Use time that already exists
- Walking meetings for conversations that need no screen. See daily steps.
- Calls on foot.
- The first hour after landing: a walk before the hotel room.
- Stairs.
None of this replaces training. It reduces the amount of sitting that training has to offset. See sitting all day.
7. Plan around the calendar you actually have
Look at the next quarter. Where are the closings, the board meetings, the long trips? Plan lighter training in those weeks and progress in the others. Being surprised every month by an event that recurs every month is a planning failure, not a lack of will. See exercise and stress.
What training gives back
The usual objection is that the hours spent training are hours not spent working. The evidence points the other way: regular activity improves sleep, mood and cognitive function, and fitter people recover faster from stress. The four hours tend to raise the quality of the other sixty-six.
There is also the longer account. The capacity to work at this level at 60 depends on what was done at 45.
The first step
Open your diary for next week. Enter two forty-minute appointments before 8 am on days without travel. Tell one person. Begin with those two and add nothing until they have happened four weeks running.
If you would rather the appointment be with someone who arrives at your door and already knows your week, that is what the Club arranges. How to get started.
Balance is not an equal division of time. It is the smallest amount of training that keeps the rest sustainable, protected every week.
Questions
How do busy executives find time to exercise?
They schedule it rather than find it. Sessions are entered in the diary as recurring appointments, usually early in the morning before other demands begin, kept to forty minutes, held close to home or the office, and tied to another person such as a coach or training partner. They also keep a shorter version ready for heavy weeks, so the habit never lapses.
Is it better to exercise in the morning or the evening?
For consistency, the morning usually wins: it is the part of the day least likely to be taken by something else. For performance, late afternoon is slightly better, when body temperature and strength peak. The best time is the one you can keep every week. Avoid very hard sessions within an hour of going to bed.
What is the minimum amount of exercise worth doing?
Any amount is better than none: the largest health gain comes from moving from inactivity to some activity. A workable minimum for a difficult week is two sessions of twenty to thirty minutes, one for strength and one aerobic, with a daily walk. It will not improve fitness much, and it will prevent losing what you have built.
Sources
- World Health Organization: guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour (2020)
- World Health Organization: physical activity, key facts
- Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: AASM and Sleep Research Society consensus (Sleep, 2015)
- American College of Sports Medicine: quantity and quality of exercise for healthy adults (2011)