How to Add Fun and Fitness to your Daily Schedule

Before the days of Day-Timers and Palm Pilots, college students who had the privilege of taking summer classes in how to succeed in college found a simple daily grid helpful listed the hours of day down the side of the page. starting from about 7a.m. and going till about p.m., and you drew columns across the page, one for each day, Monday through Sunday. You then filled in your class times, perhaps 8-10 a Monday and Wednesday for psych, 1-3 p.m Monday and Thursday for English, and so on, Not only could you see at glance when you had classes, but you could easily see your blocks of free time.

Back in the old days, students put the schedule inside plastic sheet and used a grease marker to plan the variables. You could fill that up with time at the library, time at the lab and time in the weight room or swimming laps at the university pool. And, of course, party time. This type of scheduling is easier today with computerized schedulers and proposed planners, hut the concept is just as useful, if you schedule something in writing, you're more likely to do it. You also know how easily it fits into your schedule, no matter how busy or disorganized you might he. Maybe you're over by the PP. building after your math class, when you have an hour or two until your nest class. What better time to train". Put it on your schedule. Maybe you have an evening to spend with friends from the dorm.

Why not head to the gym for an hour, then clean up and hit the party? Got a standing date for pizza on Saturday night? If you arrive an hour later, you'll have more time for fitness or studying beforehand, and you'll save some calories, too, The value-added for including exercise in your schedule, even when you feel pressured, is that you'll study better, think more clearly complete multiple tasks quicker and feel good. You'll surely he healthier, likely avoiding some illnesses that wreak havoc physically and psychologically. Take a good look at your schedule - you'll probably see more free time than you expected. Use it wisely.

If you aren't a linear thinker, you might appreciate pie-chart time management. We've used pie charts as a management tool to show how lob duties can he delegated by slicing the pie, so to speak. But using it for personal time management is a new concept for us. Their approach was making time for joy; ours is making time for fitness, although some consider that the same thing. Begin by thinking of your day as a circle. Work and/or school take up a big slice, hut you probably still have lots of pie left. Do you spend 2-4 hours watching playing video games or chatting on the internet? Take lust a small slice, say an hour, off of that leisure time and use it for fitness: Weight train some days and do cardio or fun activities the other days.

Be sure to graph your whole 24 hours to also determine if you're getting your full eight hours of sleep. If not, maybe you could sliver some time elsewhere to give yourself a bigger slice of sleep, which is critical to both college and bodybuilding success. Any way you slice it, you can manage your time wisely and he happier and healthier for it.