Why Busy People Fail at Fitness and How to Fix It

Long work meetings, last-minute projects, picking up the kids, running errands, and mental exhaustion can make it hard for any 30- or 40-year-old to get in shape. I understand the struggle with working out consistently, even if you felt so motivated while signing up for your new gym membership. Unfortunately, people instinctively tend to blame their laziness for skipping out on the gym, but in reality, it’s really not.

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Being a responsible professional, parent, and overall adult requires vast amounts of focus, discipline, and effort, which is the opposite of being lazy. Instead, what you need is a workout routine that fits your goals, abilities, and schedule, and resetting your mindset.

The Workout Routine

The last thing a busy 30- and 40-year-old needs is a training plan that has them stuck at the gym for hours and having to go five or six times a week. Even as a collegiate athlete and while serving in the Navy, we only lifted weights three times a week, so it blows my mind when I get new clients telling me they want to come in just about every day. What I do with these folks is get a good idea of their goals, training skill and experience, and any other limitations, then select four to seven exercises, with the first four being the most important to the client’s goals.

If you’re in your 30s or 40s, odds are that you don’t have a lot of free time; therefore, trying to copy some 20-year-old TikTok influencer’s workout routine is not going to benefit you. Take a look at your schedule to look for a gap where you could fit in a 30-45 minute workout; for most of my clients, this usually means shifting a couple of things, which is okay, just as long as you can do your workout without missing out on important tasks. Using supersets (for example, doing a set for a lower body exercise, then moving directly to doing a set for an upper body exercise, and finally taking your rest between sets), this can shorten the training time, especially when you don’t have to travel to different ends of the gym.

Training montages, like what you see in the Rocky movies and hype videos for an upcoming UFC fight, look awesome, but training like that each day is unrealistic and ill-advised for busy professionals in their 30s and 40s. Instead of trying to train super hard and leaving the gym while drenched in sweat, focus more on staying consistent with going to the gym, especially in the beginning. The reason is that training that hard can quickly erode motivation because it requires a lot of energy and increases injury risk; in my experience, injuries can crush fitness goals since they take time to heal and take away your time to be able to work out.

Planning Around Your Schedule

Your obligations are your obligations, so there’s no need for any busy professional to abandon their responsibilities because they think fitness goals can only be reached by spending hours at the gym. When I get a new client, I have them look at their calendars to pick out the openings where they are afforded the best opportunity at the gym without impeding on their other responsibilities. In most cases, the less important things can often be shifted around to open up more space for your workouts.

What can busy professionals do about their workouts on the days where work and/or family obligations are pounding them? This is a common hurdle my clients, and most 30- and 40-year-olds, have to encounter all too often. In this case, it’s not realistic for you to do your full workout on your training plan, which is where exercise order plays a major role if you can still make it to the gym, and having a set of weights or, at least, resistance bands at home, when you can’t go to the gym. Most of my clients’ training plans consist of six or seven exercises, in which they’re ordered to allow for supersets and the first four scheduled exercises are the most important, so the remaining can be skipped if time is that tight. If the workout has to be done at home, I provide my clients with shortened exercises that utilize smaller weights and bands, so you won’t have to buy super expensive exercise machines, like those they have at the gym.

When it comes to workouts and eating healthy, busy 30- and 40-year-olds should focus more on exercises and meals that are practical and sustainable, instead of trying to overcomplicate things. Doing exercises that you can handle and enjoy when you’re able to increase the weight and repetitions to make them more challenging, this is going to keep you from dreading your workouts. As for the nutrition side, trying to overdo it with the types of foods that you know are good for you, but that you’ve never liked, or trying to use highly complicated recipes, it’s going to be very difficult to stick with that diet.

Change Your Mindset, Change Your Life

When you’re a busy person that’s always short on time, you have to learn to accept that perfection isn’t the goal. For most of my clients when they’re just getting started, they have it in their minds that they’re going to be doing all of these great exercises that are going to produce the results they want in no time, but that’s not how things go in real life. Most of the time, these clients are fairly new, or totally new, to lifting weights, so I first have to teach them how to do the exercises before moving forward with adding weight. Change your mindset by understanding the fitness journey is a long-term process, and one that, ideally, goes on for the rest of your life, instead of just the six weeks before your upcoming vacation.

Planning ahead of time is one of the most underrated and underutilized practices that can be of massive help to busy professionals who don’t have a lot of free time. For your workouts, maintain a training log that specifies which exercises, the amount of weight, repetition ranges, and number of sets you will be doing, then recording your performance in the log; doing this spells out everything you need to do to reach your goals and eliminates having to do some on-the-spot decisions on the gym floor.

One of the biggest mindset mistakes people make is to view exercise as punishment, especially when they had a little slip-up, like eating junk food outside of their cheat day or having missed a workout. Mistakes are going to be made during your fitness journey, and that is totally normal. When you use exercise as punishment, this is going to create negative thoughts about exercise, rather than all the positive benefits that come with it, like having more energy, reducing the risk of chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes, and reducing stress.

Conclusion

No matter how you want to look at things, life in your 30s and 40s is always going to make it seem like we don’t have enough time. Long projects and lengthy meetings at work, and the kids’ dentist appointments and soccer tournaments might come at the least convenient time, but these are things that cannot be skipped. However, you also have to prioritize your own needs, particularly your health, to continue being there when you’re needed for years to come. By adopting a smart workout and nutrition plan that suits your needs, likes, goals, and fits nicely into your schedule, as well as understanding that things don’t have to be perfect to be fit, you will start to see positive results popping up and continue seeing them for the long term.

If you want to know the easiest way to get started with your fitness journey, sign up for my FREE 5-Day Fitness Reset email course by CLICKING HERE.

About the Author

Julio Lopez is a Navy Veteran, former collegiate athlete, and personal trainer with a Master’s degree in Nutrition. He is the founder of 365 Physique Personal Training and Nutrition, where he specializes in helping busy people build a healthy lifestyle into their schedule. You can find Julio training his in-person clients at Versatile Fitness in east El Paso, Texas and sharing practical tips on social media.