How to easily carve out time for MS exercises

Do you struggle to find time for your MS exercises? Do you feel a bit overwhelmed and behind when it comes to catching up with even the essential tasks in life, not to talk about exercising? Maybe your daily to-do list has become too long? Are you not managing to carve out time for MS exercises? You are not alone! Lack of time is often on the top of the list of reasons as to why we are not exercising. This goes for people both with and without MS. We discussed lack of time as a barrier for exercising in a previous post. In this post you will get an exercise with 3 elements, which will help you to carve out time for MS exercises. Simple!

1/ Take a close look at how you spend your day

Write down all activities. Write down how much time you spend on each activity.

2/ Pick 1-3 activities which you can either discontinue, shorten or delegate

Take a close look at the activities.

Are any of them big time wasters? Are any of them less important to you? Does any of the activities drain you mentally and/or physically?

You probably recognize this situation – when you have MS you are keen to cling on to normality and keep going as you used to. However, some times it pays off to look closely at the way you spend your day. Chosing the right battles may help for some. The weekly shop might drain you immensely leaving you with little energy. Perhaps you could split it up over the week, use your electric scooter, bring a family member, use online shopping or simple just delegate that task to someone else. This way you may save some energy and have time for other things.

Positive problem solving!

3/ Make use of waiting time and dual-tasking

Explore opportunities while waiting in everyday life:

• The kettle boiling or the coffee machine brewing
• Waiting at the supermarket till
• Waiting for the washing machine to finish and unlock the door

Make use of dual-tasking:

• Move your feet up and down while knitting
• Sit up straight without back support when you are eating
• Do wall squats while you are brushing your teeth.
• Marching on the spot while sitting down watching TV

Reflection – were you able to carve out time for MS exercises?

How did you get on with the 3 part exercise?

Which activity was your worst time waster?

Were you able to stop or delegate any activities?

Were you able to carve out some time by making use of waiting time? Did you find any of your activities you could combine with exercises and do dual-tasking?

Hit me with a smiley in the comments if you were able to carve out some time for MS exercises, which you didn’t realize you had.

Bonus point….. put up little notes to remind you of your dual task activities. A yellow note by the kettle won’t hurt.

In fact it will only help!