Hello!  I’m Rachel from Life. Or Something Like It.  I was incredibly excited when Cassie asked me to be a guest poster on her blog.  She is one of my favorite bloggers and she has me laughing through every post she writes!  Thank you Cassie for this opportunity!

If you read my blog, you know that I am extremely busy.  For the past year, I have been in a student teaching program working my way toward a credential in special education. On top of school work, I have student teaching, work, two dogs, a social life, and I managed to exercise for 365 days straight (and still haven’t broken that streak).  Being busy, it is easy to put exercise on the back burner, but here is how I have managed to fit in at least 30 minutes of exercise a day, seven days a week and still graduate from the credential program with honors.

1.  I plan around my workout. It is very easy to put off exercising.  It hurts (in a good way).  It makes you tired. Just about anything in the world is more fun and can be used as an excuse not to do it. So when it comes to exercise, I always plan my day around my workout.  At the beginning of the year, when I knew I would be going all day for twelve hours, I planned to start my day with exercise.  Then, there was no excuse when 8 pm rolled around and I was supposed to work out, but chose to hang out with my lady friends at the bar.  Now, I work until 3:30 or 4:00 and don’t make plans with anyone until after 6:00 pm, so that way, I know I will have a good hour to workout at the gym.

2.  I make it a priority. I am at the point where if I don’t exercise, I act like a crazy person and nobody wants to be around me.  But I was not always at that point.  I made exercising a priority.  I still made plans with friends, but I told them I needed to workout first.   I studied massive amounts, but when I took a break, I made sure I went to the gym instead of sitting on the computer watching Netflix.

3. I do little things throughout the day. On days when I know I am absolutely not going to be making it to the gym due to an extremely busy day, I add in little spurts of exercise where I can.  If I’m going to the store, I park in the back so that I get an extra walk in.  I take the stairs instead of an elevator.  I put on music and dance around my room while I fold laundry.  I have even been known to do squats in the bathroom and push-ups in the classroom when no children are in there.  The little things add up!

4. I do exercise that I WANT to do.  It is incredibly hard to motivate yourself to do something you absolutely do not want to do.  I just ran an amazing PR half marathon two weeks ago.  Since then, I have not wanted to do much running.  Coming off of 40 mile weeks, I felt lazy the first week when I did much less than that.  I was beating myself up and dreading tying up my laces because I just simply did not have the drive to run.  So, I changed my mind set.  I don’t want to run, so I have been focusing on lifting.  This is something I enjoy and has been motivating me to get into the gym every day.

5. I trained for something.  Having a race on the horizon made it pretty impossible to skip workouts.  There were days where I was drowning in work and lacking sleep.  The knowledge that I had a race coming up that I had paid for kept me motivated to train for it.  I didn’t want the money to go to waste and I didn’t want to show up to the race unprepared.  Having a goal in mind makes it much easier to get up and move!

So those are a few of my tips for keeping up with exercise even when you are super busy!  I hope they helped.  Thank you so much for reading.  And again, thank you to Cassie for asking me to guest post!