While shopping at a local department store, someone approached my gym partner, asks if he lifts weights. My friend replies yes. Stranger asks his age. Gym Partner says 56. And you still lift? As if it’s an unheard thing to care for your health and fitness into your fifties and beyond. Stranger says he used to lift ten years ago. Knowing my gym partner, he tells the guy to get back into it. Here it comes . . . I don’t have the time. 

I had to ask. Ten years and he didn’t have a single moment of free or spare time? Where’s this guy been the past 10 years, Witness Protection Program? Always on the move, attempting to stay one step ahead of the law?

Pretty thin excuse. In this day and age, when everyone thinks multitasking is a God given right that you’re supposed to perform so they can have it easy, (even notice the more balls you juggle in the air, nothing really gets done or completed? As the saying goes, there's never enough time to do it right, but always time to do it over). No one has the time. You MAKE the time. Let’s be honest with one another. I don’t have the time means you don’t want to put in the effort. No one is bothering me and a host of other people at 5am when we’re hitting the iron. Many others are either coming home at 5, or trying to get as much sleep as possible before hurrying off to work, still arrive late, and complain they didn’t get the best of the donuts someone left in the break room. And why isn’t the coffee made?

Take a few sheets of paper. Take three to five days out of your week. Each day from the time you arise until the time your head hits the pillow, annotate everything you do, and how long it takes you. Everything. At the end of the experiment, take note of how your time is spent. Three to five hours a night watching TV? Untold hours spent forwarding email jokes to everyone in the three closest time zones? (Trust me, they aren’t funny, hilarious or giggle worthy. Stop it.) Happy hour every night? Really? And that thing you do where you come home, collapse on the sofa and don’t move any faster than the arctic glaciers? Why do you think you constantly feel that way?

And you say you can’t find 30 to 45 to 60 minutes, at least three times a week to devote to your health and well being?

There’s a great YouTube Nike video about excuses. It’s pretty comical listening to the many excuses, until the very end, when you realize why the particular speaker was tapped by Nike to do it. Give it a watch, then ask yourself if you really can’t be bothered because time is a factor. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obdd31Q9PqA