Fitness Tips for Students: Effective Exercises and Wellness Strategies | Free Willy Fitness
As somewhat of an expert at being a student, I know the very unique struggle that you face trying to maintain or improve your fitness while being a full time student as well. It can feel as if you’re always trying to play catch up, especially when you make a scheduling mistake or forget about a project that needs to get completed last minute. Not to mention trying to balance time for social interaction and maintaining the health of your interpersonal relationships. With all these stressors adding to each other, it can be easy to develop anxiety around fitness and even just neglecting it all together. Below are some tips that can make big impacts on your ability to thrive in all aspects of student life, including your health and fitness.
SCHEDULING
This may be the most important of the bunch. As a full time student, of all ages middle school through graduate school, you are taking a number of courses. Last quarter of chiropractic school I myself was taking 7 lecture courses and two of which had lab components in addition to the lecture. Days would range from 4 hours to 9 hours of class time, and each had multiple quizzes, tests, or projects that needed to be completed during the 11 weeks of the quarter. Being able to schedule your workouts throughout the weeks will only allow you to have less stress.
In my first quarter at the school I was taking a greater course load and working out 6-7 days per week doing a bodybuilding cut. If I hadn’t scheduled time for my workouts, I would have easily been overwhelmed trying to fit everything into my already hectic schedule.
Here’s how I would recommend going about scheduling.
1. Schedule out the entire term with classes each week and marking special notes of when projects and tests may be due.
2. Add all other NON NEGOTIABLE events and dates. Things in this category may be events like family weddings, birthdays, or previously planned trips and vacations.
3. After all non negotiable things have been scheduled, now you can start looking at days and times in which it might be feasible to get to the gym.
o SUPER IMPORTANT: make sure you can factor in typical traffic times to get to the gym or your place of workout, as well as to get to where you need to go after. This is especially important if you choose to workout in the morning. You don’t want to be in a rush because you didn’t realize that traffic got busy as you left the gym and don’t have enough time to get to work.
o Don’t forget to include any time needed to get ready after your workout.
o You can also add in time to do meal prep if that is something you plan on doing in addition to your workout plan.
BE FLEXIBLE
Although it is good to be physically flexible, that’s not what I’m getting at here. Being flexible with your workout schedule is essential. There are some days where you’ve got a workout scheduled, but you realize you have 2 midterms and a project due three days from your scheduled workout. You will feel an overwhelming sense of what can only be described as, “Oh shit…”. Do not fret. This is not an issue. Missing one, or even a few workouts will not ruin your progress.
There are a couple things you can do in that scenario. If you all of a sudden realize that there’s no chance you can get your workout in try doing something easy that doesn’t take much time or something that you can do while you study.
1. Many schools allow for students to do audio recording of lectures. If your school allows, you can record the lecture then listen to it again later on as you go on a walk or a short run. You can also listen to these lectures while sitting in traffic or while you are doing some mobility work.
2. Look at the time slots you have available in the upcoming days and add a workout to an available time slot. This doesn’t even have to be a full workout. Just schedule some time to do something that will help you get on towards your goal. This can be workout related, nutrition related, recovery related etc.
3. Do nothing. Again, this won’t kill your progress missing one workout. Personally I like to feel like I didn’t miss an entire session so doing things like walking, a cardio session, or something else helps me feel like I stayed on track more. But that’s a personal preference of mine.
Remember. You need to be able to adapt to the things that pop up in your schedule. As much planning as we do, we can never plan and schedule enough to stop things from popping up that take priority.
SET ATTAINABLE GOALS
The whole reason we set goals is to get better, and make achievements. If you set a goal that is going to impossible to accomplish because of time requirements, there is no chance you’ll be successful at your goal AND at school. Remember, if you’re beyond high school, someone is paying for that education. Having a beach body can happen most of your life. Sometimes you only get one shot at the education opportunity that you are in.
Here’s some good guidelines so you can set yourself up for some attainable goals.
1. Average weight loss over the course of an entire program, meaning you’ll have fluctuations week to week and day to day, is about ½ a pound to 2 pounds per week.
2. To lose 1 pound you need to burn about 3,500 calories more than you intake. This can be divided up over a week or even 2 weeks. Divided up daily for a week comes out to 500 cal/day deficit, for 2 weeks it is about 250 cal/day deficit.
3. The expected body fat percentage lost per week can range from 0.5% - 1%. (this is conservative and it can definitely be larger with a greater calorie deficit.
4. The amount of muscle you gain per month averages maybe in the range of ¼ of a pound to ½ of a pound per month. ** Remember, if you’re new to the gym this number will be higher.
a. This number seems super small, but remember. If you were to gain even 1 pound of muscle every month for a year that would be 12 pounds of straight muscle mass. Think about that now for 2, or even 3 years. That means you would have gained 24 to 36 pounds of muscle. That is more than most people can hope to gain even in their lifetime of strength training.
You cannot separate the body from the mind. Therefore a healthy body means a healthy mind, and a healthy mind can only benefit your educational pursuits.
