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How to Budget Your Fitness Time

by Michael Plank

There are approximately eight million things you should be doing to be fit, healthy, and live a long life… at least it seems like it. Every clickbait article and influencer out there gives you another 3 things that are the secret, or the must-do hack, or the thing they tried for 30 days and look what happened. But you’re probably not a fitness influencer, which means you probably have other things to do with your life than think about health and fitness 24/7.

So what do you do? What’s important? What’s nonsense?

Now, the real answer here is: it depends. But, that being said, I do think there’s an answer that’s appropriate for probably 80% of people and that’s what we’ll break down here. We’ll go through a couple of scenarios based on how much time you have to allot per week. I’m not including travel time or time to change or shower here, which might impact things. I’m not breaking this down by price point either, which also might impact things. But here’s what I’d do if the only time I had to devote to my health and fitness each week was…

3 hours

There are basically four tools to improve a person’s health and fitness: movement, nutrition, sleep, and stress management. If you can only pick one, start with movement.

If I were limited to 3 hours per week, I’d do two 60-minute CrossFit sessions each week for general strength and conditioning, and one 45-minute Personal Training or Semi-Private Training session dedicated to strength and muscle gain. Coming from nothing, a person will see radical results in their fitness with this approach. It’ll be easier to go up and down stairs, to play with kids, to hike, swim, fish, and more. They’ll feel better and likely see a decrease in aches and pains.

5 hours

I’d bump CrossFit to three times per week, keep the single 45-minute Personal/Semi-Private Training strength session, and then I’d add 75 minutes of walking. This could be broken into a couple of sessions. I cannot overstate how beneficial walking is. It massively improves your aerobic efficiency and helps to build a strong and robust foundation for your fitness that allows you to do the flashier stuff without feeling completely beat up. If it feels too boring and easy, walk somewhere with a lot of hills. If it still feels boring and easy and you’re in pretty good shape, throw some weight in a backpack (the cool kids call this “rucking”). But NO ONE is so fit that they won’t get fitter by adding walking into their regimen.

6 hours

CrossFit three times per week, 45-minute strength session once a week, 75 minutes of walking, and I’d add 10 minutes of stretching/mobility work per day for 6 days each week. Joint work/mobility work/flexibility work is huge. It could easily be multiple posts by itself, but for our purposes right now, here’s the takeaway: it lets you do more stuff, lift more weight, and have less pain. It takes consistent, active work, but 10 minutes a day is enough to see massive improvement.

7 hours

All of the above. Plus I’d spend an hour planning out meals for the week (Were you expecting more movement stuff? Trick!). This is not necessarily the same as preparing meals for the week. What I like to do for this is come up with a couple of protein sources that I can make in large quantity to have on hand to supplement lunches, and then I’ll come up with 4 dinners that I’ll make during the week that can have leftovers. That usually takes me about 10 minutes. Then prepping and cooking the protein sources might be another 30-40.

For example, I might cook 3lbs of lean ground beef with taco seasoning and grill half a dozen chicken breasts with salt and pepper. Those two protein sources can go into salads, soups, sandwiches, wraps, pastas, rice, and vegetables to add quick and easy protein throughout the week. Then I might plan to make chili on Monday night, salmon with Brussels sprouts on Tuesday night, chicken stir fry with rice on Wednesday night, and enchiladas on Thursday night. Between leftovers and pop up weekend events, that should cover me and my family.

Eating is an enormous part of overall health (we’ve got posts and posts and posts about this topic too), and though it’s always important, especially if you’ve got the movement dialed, it’s definitely time to start working in the kitchen.

12 hours

All of the above.

Plus, I’d start going to bed one hour earlier each weeknight. Sleep quality and quantity is massively underrated for its impact on health, immune function, longevity, injury resistance, muscle gain, hunger cues, mood, and probably a million other things too. And most of us don’t sleep nearly enough. Negative consequences of poor sleep that pop up in adults and adolescents who are regularly sleep deprived start showing up with consistent sleep periods of less than 7 hours (according to the US Institute of Medicine). Not less than 6, or less than 4. Less than 7. I don’t know all that many people who regularly sleep 7+ hours per night.

13 hours

All of the above.

Plus I’d add in 10 minutes per day of stillness. Maybe meditating with an app like Headspace or Happier. Maybe just staring out a window. Maybe closing your eyes and sitting in your favorite chair. But a few minutes to let your mind disconnect. (Note: screen use, scrolling, streaming are all fine. But they do not count as stillness).

The benefits of stillness for decreasing systemic stress and improving health, immune function, happiness, and even lifespan have been well documented. (There’s loads out there that a google search will get you, here’s one study).

13+ hours

If you’ve got all that dialed, then I’d start to look at

  • Fine-tuning nutrition. This might include food quality, specific macronutrient goals, specific calorie goals, and nutrient timing.
  • More walking or “Zone 2 Cardio,” and potentially more high-intensity training, shooting for at least a 1:1 ratio of low-intensity to high-intensity. (If that ratio is going to be uneven at this level, bias for more low-intensity than high-intensity).
  • Ensuring that you have a minimum of 7.5 hours of lights-out, distraction-free time set aside each night for sleep.
  • Therapy/Counseling
  • Spiritual Development
  • Financial Management (see: stress management above!)

And if all of that is in place, then start trying all the weird shit that the influencers are peddling, because you know what works a lot better than glutamine, beta-alanine, turmeric, and acai berries? Solid training, balanced nutrition, quality sleep, and mental health for a lifetime.