How I Stopped Making Excuses and Actually Started Working Out as a Student

Alright guys, I am going to be honest with you. During the majority of my first year, my exercise habit was virtually non-existent. I continued to tell myself that I would begin after midterms, or after that particular group project had been finished, or when things slowed down a bit. Spoiler: There was no slowing down of things. And frankly, I was feeling unenergetic, unfocused, and bad moodwise due to it.

I am not a personal trainer. I am a student who learnt the lesson too late that moving around is not the solution to making things more difficult. This is simply what I would want someone to tell me when I had just begun my program.

The Issue of I Don’t Have Time.

Students are genuinely busy. I am not going to deny this. In between classes, homework, part-time jobs , and the attempt to have some form of social life, an exercise may seem like another item that can be added to an already unattainable list.

However, what changed my mind was this, I was not perceiving it correctly. I continued to envision fitness as a huge, an hour long affair going to the gym, changing, the actual workout, showering and getting dressed up again. That is an equivalent of two hours of commitment. No wonder I kept skipping it.

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association (2023), one of the most effective things, which students can accomplish to handle stress and anxiety, are regular physical activity, which is essentially the default experience of studying in college or university. And a study the PLOS ONE published, revealed that brief, high-intensity exercise sessions spaced through the day can be just as beneficial to the cardiovascular system as a single session (Gillen et al., 2016). This totally transformed my approach on this.

What Actually Worked for Me.

And I began to seek ten minutes instead of an hour. An hour before my morning lesson, I have ten minutes of body weight work in my room. Whatever squats, push-ups, lunges. Nothing fancy. During lunch, walk around the campus rather than surfing with my phone. A few exercises or a little more after dinner.

That's it!!! That's the whole plan. And it was much more successful than I had ever attempted to do, as I was able to follow through.

James Clear discusses this in Atomic Habits he refers to this as habit stacking, which is the notion of adding a new habit to an existing one (Clear, 2018). I was merely inserting a couple of minutes of exercise into the activities that were already a part of my day rather than implementing a workout. Walk to class? Go the long way. Waiting for the microwave? Do calf raises. And so little, yet it quickly adds.

The Chapter that No one Discusses: Sleep and Food.

My previous understanding of fitness was limited to the aspect of exercise. I had a serious underestimation of the importance of sleep and nutrition on the way you feel and how you perform. My energy changed totally when I began to really attempt to sleep 7-8 hours rather than 5, and consume enough protein during the day rather than merely rely on coffee and whatever was available in the campus cafeteria.

According to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2023), it is possible to focus on 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight in order to achieve the effect of muscle performance and the maintenance of energy. I will not deceive you and tell you that I actually made that number in every single day but being more mindful about it helped.

An Ideal Week (But Real on the Ground).

Monday: Bodyweight circuit 10 minutes prior to class. Tuesday: 20-minute gym workout of no big accomplishment except some resistance exercises. Wednesday: off day, possibly a little stretching. Thursday: 20-min HIIT. Friday: Walk-heavy, active commute. Weekend: What you really love to do a pick up basketball game, hiking or biking with a friend.

That is probably 75-90 minutes of planned activity per week. More than manageable.

Why This Is in fact a big deal to Your Grades as well.

It may sound far fetched, but I have a point to make. Having begun to move more regularly, I started to focus on lectures significantly better. I became less fearful when taking exams. I slept better. Studies support this idea, i.e. one study in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry showed that students that exercised at least three times per week had reported lower levels of depression and burnout much lower than their sedentary colleagues did (Rosenbaum et al., 2020).

Maintaining your body does not exist outside academic performance. They are directly connected.

So Where Do You Start?

Honestly, just start small. This week, do one of these things, which you have picked. That's all. You do not have to have a perfect plan, you just need to create a habit that you can stick with during a very hectic semester. DailyFit11 offfers virtual classes starting at $15, and it was designed based on schedules such as yours. Come to visit it and reserve your first session in surajpotha.wixstudio.com/dailyfit11.

References

Canadian Mental Health Association. (2023). Post-secondary students and mental health. https://cmha.ca

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. Avery.

Gillen, J. B., Martin, B. J., MacInnis, M. J., Skelly, L. E., Tarnopolsky, M. A., & Gibala, M. J. (2016). Twelve weeks of sprint interval training improves indices of cardiometabolic health similar to traditional endurance training despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and time commitment. PLOS ONE, 11(4). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154075

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. (2023). The nutrition source: Protein. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/protein/

Rosenbaum, S., Tiedemann, A., & Ward, P. B. (2020). Meta-analysis: Exercise interventions for depression in university students. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 65(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743719890042

Statistics Canada. (2022). Physical activity among Canadian youth and young adults. https://www.statcan.gc.ca