Snippets From The Book

I want to give you a feel for what you will read in Find Time for Exercise, so this page contains a few sample passages from the book.

This book is aimed at everyone, absolutely everyone, including you.

It is a passionate promotion of the benefits of regular exercise and in particular the benefits of adopting an exercise challenge, however modest it might be, to help you stay motivated.

I am not an Olympic champion, international footballer or renowned mountaineer, just someone who loves being active and wants to share his passion with you.

Whether you are male or female, young or old, fit, unfit or somewhere in-between, this book is for you. It doesn’t push any specific type of exercise challenge and it certainly doesn’t matter what level of fitness you currently have. That’s because it is not a book about competitive sport, but about exercise and the physical and mental health benefits that can be gained from taking regular exercise.

I’ve already mentioned the word exercise several times, but please think of exercise in its widest possible sense, or read it as activity or movement if those words are more appropriate for you. I don’t want anyone to be put off by a mere word. If this book encourages you to move more, then it has done its job.

This is a self-help book aimed at helping anyone to become more active than they currently are, no matter where they are on the spectrum between totally inactive and superfit. All the stories in this book are of people who have moved along that spectrum and increased their activity levels, some by a small amount and others by more than they imagined they were capable of.

Please don’t be discouraged by those who are going beyond what you can ever imagine yourself doing. Instead, try to pick out the pieces of advice they’re giving and think about how you could apply those ideas into your own situation.

So, I invite you to come on this journey with me, and I hope you will be inspired to find time for exercise and set your own exercise challenge, however small or great. You might just be amazed at what you can achieve.

My appeal to you is to consider what might be an appropriate challenge for you to take on. It doesn’t matter how modest it might be. If it involves you being more active than you are at present, then you are likely to benefit from that extra exercise. So, please work your way through this book, read about the background to the way inactivity is such a danger to the human body (Part 1), take inspiration from my challenge (Part 2) and those of the other people that I interviewed for this book (Part 3), and look at the broad spectrum of other challenges (Part 4) that are available for you to adopt or adapt. The culmination of this book (Part 5) is when I help you to find a way of challenging yourself and hopefully moving you along that spectrum towards being a more active and healthier version of yourself. You’ll see you are not alone, and that the rewards are achievable, no matter what your starting point.

My starting point for writing this book is that I wanted to write the book I wish I had read when I was 20, and as I read it back to myself now, I feel that I’ve achieved that goal. Had I read this book in 1980, I might have had a 40-year unbroken run of making a five kilometre journey every day by now, and perhaps enjoyed better health over some of those intervening years. Whatever age you are when you read this book, I just hope that you enjoy it and feel inspired to become more active. You never know, it might make you a healthier, happier, fitter and more confident person. You might even live longer.

While I explore the exercise routines of some exceptionally active and highly driven people, this isn’t just about the superfit and hyperactive. This is very much about the busy mum or overweight 60+ year old who makes a deliberate decision to set themselves an apparently simple challenge like getting out and walking a couple of extra miles a week. If you are inspired by their endeavours, or maybe just one of their stories, then that will please me no end.

All chairs should have a warning sign nailed to them, front and back, and these signs should be so big, so prominent, that we could not approach a chair without seeing the writing on these signs.

WARNING – This is a chair. It is potentially hazardous to your health, could shorten your life, and in conjunction with other chairs has the potential to bankrupt the country. Use sparingly and only for short periods of less than half an hour in one sitting.
Sit Less - Stand More - Move More

As I go deeper and deeper into my own challenge, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in other people’s challenges. The rich spectrum of what others are doing absolutely fascinates me. I just can’t get enough of hearing the wide range of ways in which people are challenging themselves and finding methods and routines to build exercise into their lives.

This has resulted in developing a real interest and enthusiasm to find out what other activities people are taking on in order to challenge themselves, and what motivates them to start and then continue. Whether it is the radical challenges of running every day for over 50 years, or the other end of the spectrum where people are setting what might appear to be simple targets, but which for them can represent a major effort and significant change to their routines. So, while I love hearing about the extreme end of that spectrum, I am equally passionate about the person that decides to climb the stairs to the 7th floor instead of taking the lift, or builds a 15-minute lunchtime walk into their busy daily schedule, or sets out to cycle 1,000 miles in the year at the age of 87.

There are a number of ‘off-the-shelf’ challenges that attract mass participation, and Part 4 will look at a selection of those, but for many people a challenge is a personal invention that they develop for themselves. These personal challenges can have their roots in one of the mass-participation challenges, or they can just be the result of an imaginative mind. Wherever these challenges come from, I really appreciate hearing about them and adding them to my list of fun ways to set an exercise target.

The next few pages are devoted to the stories of ten individuals who told me about their personal challenges. In each case I asked the same six questions.

1.    What’s your challenge?

2.    How long have you been doing it?

3.    What motivated you to start?

4.    What motivates you to continue?

5.    What difference has it made to your life?

6.    What’s your message to anyone that isn’t taking regular exercise?

The comments and background stories I recorded from these interviews are presented here under the following headings that capture the main reasons for choosing to increase your levels of physical activity:

·         Concerns about being overweight

·         Issues relating to mental health

·         Concerns about physical health

·         A desire to be proactive and prevent health-related problems

·         A desire to improve your strength and fitness levels

This is a book about the benefits of regular exercise, but this chapter looks at the other aspects of a healthy lifestyle - sleep, hydration, diet and stretching. Make improvements in each of those areas and you are likely to feel some really positive benefits to your health.

I will stress again, this is a book about the benefits of regular exercise, so I won’t go into the other aspects in anything like the same level of detail as I have for exercise. There are plenty of books and websites out there on each of these subjects, and I would certainly recommend to anyone that they read around these aspects of a healthy lifestyle, analyse what you read, think about what works for you and then make a real effort to implement some positive changes in each of these areas.

From my experience, if you take one of these aspects seriously and spend some time thinking about it, then you are likely to be drawn towards thinking about each of the others.

If you keep thinking and learning about SHEDS (Sleep, Hydration, Exercise, Diet, Stretching) and keep making improvements in each of those areas, then you are likely to be making the best possible investments in your future life. Try this for yourself, and I hope you find yourself on an upwards spiral. Think of SHEDS as a five-pronged attack on unhealthy lifestyles.

I often hear people say, “It’s alright for you” or “It’s alright for him or her over there,” followed by, “but I just don’t have time for exercise”.

My response is that it’s not about having time, it’s about finding time.

Remember, “Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness”. As Chris said in his interview, “It’s as simple as that really”.

Another piece of advice to ponder on is this: If you’re doubtful about being able to find the time, don’t let your circumstances control you, control your circumstances.

One of the main aims of this book is to provide you with practical ideas to help you find time for exercise.

This final part of the book, Your Challenge, is going to present a wide range of those ideas, which I hope you will be able to learn from and put into practice in your own situation.

Finding time for exercise, in my view, is a three-stage process. Firstly, to recognise the need to take more exercise, secondly to make a plan as to how you are going to do it, and then thirdly to put that plan into action.

You have already read about my plan and those of the people in the in-depth interviews, so that should have given you a few ideas for a plan, but this section of the book is going to provide you with a lot more ideas that you could adopt or adapt for yourself. So, if you recognise the need to take more exercise and want to make a plan, you’re in the right place.

Then, in terms of putting your plan into action, you will need to focus on staying focused. Using exercise as a way of looking after yourself is like anything else in life, you have to work at it, and then keep working at it. You can’t do a bit and then say you’ve done it; you have to keep going, keep working at it, day after day, month after month and year after year. It’s hard work, but incredibly rewarding. Just like studying, succeeding in a job, having a rewarding relationship, or anything else in life, you just have to keep on keeping on. As Albert Einstein said, “Life is like riding a bicycle. In order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

I would argue that along with climate change and plastic pollution, obesity and human physical inactivity combine to be one of the most pressing and urgent societal challenges that we face today.

It really is time for everyone, every individual, you, me and politicians to take this issue seriously and take action to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.

Also, remember what Sam said in her interview in Chapter 13, “It’s about finding something that hooks you, that motivates you”.

It is perfectly acceptable, indeed advisable, to revise your target from time-to-time. If you set a target and find it is too easy or too hard, then you can amend it. For example, if you set a walking target, but want to switch it to a multi-activity target, then amend it. The most important points are that you find what works for you, and that you enjoy it and keep doing it.

I hope those snippets from my book will whet your appetite and leave you wanting to read the whole book.