Helping Women Find Time to Exercise

As your schedule changes from summer to fall, will you manage to fit exercise in nearly every day? Women often have a tendency to take care of others before they take care of themselves. Your family and your job probably take top priority. By the time you’ve fulfilled those obligations, you may feel too tired or too overwhelmed to schedule in a daily workout.

But deep inside, you know that if you’re going to keep taking care of everyone else, it’s important to take care of yourself. You really do have to make yourself a priority too.

Some suggestions:

• If your mornings are crowded with making school lunches and doing things for others, see whether you can delegate those tasks to someone else. Are the kids old enough to make their own lunches now? Can your husband pitch in? If you could free up your morning for 30 minutes of exercise, that would be great.
• If mornings aren’t possible, what about lunch time? Some employers will make arrangements for their employees who want to work out during lunch to take longer lunch breaks in exchange for staying a little later at the end of the day.
• What about right after work? Maybe you wouldn’t be able to swing it every day, but even two or three days during the week would help. You could exercise both days on the weekends and that would be three or four times a week for your workout.
• If you stay home with children, trade off with others in your situation, and watch their kids while they exercise so they can do the same for you. Or, if your children are young enough, put them in strollers and walk with other parents in your neighborhood.

It takes commitment and takes up time, but who better to commit to than yourself—for your own health and well-being?

A Few Weekly Hours of Walking Increases Breast Cancer Survival Rate
A study of 2,987 women with stage 1, 2 or 3 breast cancer has shown that women who exercised three to five hours per week experienced a 50 percent reduction in risk of dying of the disease. The exercise the women performed was walking or something similar.

The woman in the study responded to detailed questionnaires about their exercise habits. Results indicated that women who walked more than five hours per week did not see an increase in benefit.

Source:
The Journal of the American Medical Association, 25 May 2005