5 Secrets of the Super Fit

You can find plenty of reasons not to work out: job pressures, family commitments and painfully long workout sessions that are equal parts boring and complicated. That is probably why the National Center for Health Statistics found that only 26 percent of Americans perform three or more intense workouts a week. The good news? I’ve discovered five simple strategies that will eliminate your obstacles, and help you make exercise a habit for life. And that’s the true secret to the lean, healthy body you want.

Schedule three workouts ahead. Plan the date, time and place of each session in Outlook or your day planner. You’ll be less likely to allow meetings or social events to interfere with your workouts. Be sure to block off a big enough chunk to account for any time needed to change your clothes, shower and travel to and from the gym—the forgotten factors that often doom workouts.

Bonus tip: Don’t let your diet ruin your hard work in the gym. Choose foods from our list of 125 Best Supermarket Foods in America.
 
Go hard, not long. Cap your exercise sessions at 30 minutes. YMCA researchers found that people were twice as likely to stick to an exercise program when they performed shorter workouts—less than 30 minutes—than when they did longer sessions. “They also gained more muscle and lost more fat, because they worked at a higher intensity, rather than just going through the motions of a long workout,” says Wayne Westcott, Ph.D., C.S.C.S., co-author of the study.

Save one workout for the weekend. “Even if Saturday and Sunday are packed with family commitments and home-improvement projects, it’s likely that you’ll still have more free time then than on any given weekday,” says John Raglin, Ph.D., an exercise psychologist at Indiana University. And that means you’ll have to fit in only two sessions from Monday through Friday.

Track the ancillary benefits. Think a busy schedule is a good excuse not to exercise? Think again. U.K. researchers found that workers were 15 percent more productive on the days they made time to exercise compared to days they skipped their workout. Now consider for a moment what these numbers mean to you: On days you exercise, you can—theoretically at least—accomplish in an eight-hour day what normally would take you nine hours and 12 minutes. Or you’d still work nine hours, but get more done, leaving you feeling less stressed and happier with your job, another perk that the workers reported on the days they exercised. So keep a job-performance journal on the days you exercise and the days you don’t exercise. Each day, gauge the difficulty of your workload on a scale of 1 (least favorable) to 7 (most favorable), and rate these three categories using the same scale:

1. Your ability to work without stopping to take unscheduled breaks
2. Your ability to stick to your routine or plan (your “to-do” list) for the day

3. Your overall job performance

“It’s likely you’ll find that you score higher and get more done on the days you exercise, despite taking time out for your workout,” says Jim McKenna, Ph.D., a professor of physical activity and health at Leeds Metropolitan University, in the United Kingdom. (Make sure you compare days that are similar in workload.) And that’ll reinforce your motivation to keep at it.

Bonus tip: Developing good habits early on will help keep you fit well into your later years. Check out these tips to learn what else will keep you youthful for longer.

Keep your streak intact. Research shows that when people skip a workout, there’s a 62 percent chance they’ll miss an exercise session the following week. Worse, “a single lapse can result in feelings of failure that are so overwhelming, a person will just quit, even though he might have successfully followed through with exercise 99 percent of the time,” says Raglin. If you don’t have time for your entire workout, take 10 minutes and do a portion of your routine—even if it’s only a couple sets of pushups and lunges.

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