Priority: What is it? Induced exercise, part 7.

(Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6)

At the very top of every family's priority list are a whole slew of completely non-negotiable things that must happen every day.

• Keep the children alive.  
• Make sure everybody who works for a living keeps his job.
• Go to the bathroom regularly enough to keep from getting a UTI.
• Make sure people get medication they need. 
• Things like that. 

You know what's on that list, the list of things that really truly can't be changed.  Everyone's is different.

But sooner or later as you move down you come to the beginning of the things that are optional on any one day.  They may be very important, but really, there are usually some alternatives to each one.  

• Housework.  Keeping a clean home is not unimportant, but on any given day you could completely skip it.  You could get behind for weeks if necessary.  No one would die.
• Getting the schoolwork done (if you're a homeschooler).  There's always Saturday, or next week.  There's always "doing the light schedule" when lots of other stuff is going on, or the first really warm week of spring, or when Grandma comes to town.  I don't recommend getting way behind, of course, but I think we've all had stretches of weeks where we didn't get everything done.  Show me a homeschooling family who's never blown off a single day in the whole history of homeschooling, and.... I'm willing to bet they have exactly one school-age kid and he's still in kindergarten. 
• Cooking meals for your family.  Sure, they've got to eat something, but no one will die or get scurvy if it's peanut butter sandwiches for a few days in a row.  Unless somebody's allergic to peanuts I guess.

Putting induced exercise at the top of your priority list --- giving it its turn for a time --- means giving it higher billing than housework, schoolwork, meal preparation... and everything else, like recreation, getting the kids to their lessons,  blogging, next year's school planning, going out to dinner with friends, movie night, projects around the house, whatever else you do with your time.  

It doesn't mean that exercising definitely pre-empts any of these.  It just means that you make a choice in advance that if your plan to exercise conflicts with any of these responsibilities, and if you can't find a way to juggle them around to make it fit, then exercise wins.  

It should be obvious that to make this work, the rest of your family needs to be on board.  Your spouse certainly has to be.  Any other people who depend on you on a regular basis.  And your inner circle, the people you lean on for help and support?  Especially the ones you trust to watch your kids from time to time?  It helps if they're on board too.

A couple things to remember as you get ready to give your own induced exercise its turn at the top of the list:

(1) It won't be for forever.  But it should be for long enough to turn regular exercise into something that feels normal to get and unusual to miss, rather than the other way around.  I recommend NOT setting a time limit, because who knows how long it'll take?  You'll know when it happens. Need a ballpark figure?  We're talking several months at least.  For me it was about a year.

(2)  It will take some thought and planning.  Allow some planning and research hours before you jump in.  More on how to do this in a later post.

(3)  You'll need to build some flexibility into your plan --- you want a way to get your exercise in even if the weather is bad, or your babysitting falls through.  But at first, allow only as much flexibility as is necessary to get around likely obstacles. Firm consistency builds habit, especially if you have a history of trying to exercise regularly and petering out.

Next post:  the story of how we got my induced exercise to the top of my family's priority list and kept it there until it didn't need to be there anymore.  After that:  Some guidelines for making your plan.

Comments

[mrsdarwin]

What's made it easier for me to get exercise in is having the equipment (in this case, weights and a few bars) at home. That doesn't work for things like swimming, of course, unless you've got a pool in the back yard, but for people who want to run or do elliptical machines or what have you, it's worth considering making an investment in home workout equipment to make sure you get that exercise into your day.

[bearing]

Interestingly enough, I am sure that it's true for some people, but I also think that a pile of home workout equipment can actually *defeat* other people. There it is, staring at you every day, perhaps being pressed into service as a drying rack, reminding you of your failure...

(We have a stair climber gathering dust in our attic.)

Me, I never had any success exercising at home. I can think of many reasons why that might be, but not until I committed to leave the house to get exercise did I get regular exercise.

[LeeAnn]

I love the humor in this post. Keeping the children alive is priority 1! Same here. :)