Working from home remote working has become of the new normal for many of us.
It is something that I’ve been doing since 2005. You need to adapt your routine to make sure you stay healthy and sane.
I know everyone is different but here are a few things that I have learned along the way.
Challenges
Working at an office has a fixed time frame that you can work around do get your training in.
Working from home tends to become all hours of the day and night as you chase a deadline.
Because you don’t get seen at home by your coworkers from the office, it is a temptation to work in your pajamas and we all know we never do our workouts in our pajamas.
Here are a couple of ways to be able to get your workout in while still working from home so that you can be fit enough to cope with the trails the moment you are able to get a good, long run in again.
Create A Schedule Or Routine
As I mentioned earlier working in an office one of the main factors is that you have a fixed routine. There’s a time for work and there’s a time for being away from work and getting out onto the trails.
So it is important that when you are working from home you create a similar type of routine for yourself. You need to have a dedicated work time and you’ve got a dedicated away from work time during which you can fit in your trail running and other workouts.
Get In Your Workout First Thing In The Morning
Getting your workout done the first thing in the morning means that you are still able to free up the remainder of your day to do your working-from-home duties. By doing your workout first thing in the morning means you don’t need to pull yourself away from your work desk to get you workout.
Another factor that I found to be incredibly helpful is that doing my workout first thing in the morning is I already have a sense of momentum associated with the sense of achievement that comes from getting something done.
I get my run in at sunrise and it sets me up for the rest of the day.
Take Some Movement Breaks Throughout The Day
What I often do is set aside time during the day to walk about and get some movement.
Back when I worked in an office my colleagues who smoked would be allocated regular smoke breaks where they could be up from the desk walk away for a couple of minutes and then return. Likewise, while I’m not a smoker, taking a couple of really short breaks of three to four minutes at a time to just walk away from the desk and back gives me just a little bit of movement.
This keeps my body at least moving between my run workouts that I do first thing every morning. If the morning workout has been particularly heavy, those movement breaks help keep my body from locking up with stiffness.
Get Out For A Walk
In the village where I live we have a small Supermarket that is within easy walking distance. So what I’ll do is I’ll break up my afternoon cycle of work by getting up, grabbing a backpack, and heading to the supermarket for whatever provisions I need for that evening as well as the following day’s lunch.
Put Specific Exercise Breaks On Your Calendar
When you’re busy with a huge work project that requires much more dedicated time that may be eroding into what would normally be your workout time, make sure that you incorporate exercise breaks into the calendar of work so that you can at least get your mind away and clear your thoughts a little bit during the course of working on your large project.
Even if it’s doing a series of burpees, a few sets of press-ups, a couple of planks, or something of the like relatively close to your desk before getting back to work. Make sure you set aside those exercise breaks regularly throughout your major work project.
Create A Fitness Area At Home
This is especially true if the weather is particularly grim and you can’t get out, even for a really short run or you are locked down in quarantine.
Within your home create an area that might be a yoga mat with a couple of free weights or something of the like. This will be a space that you can say is your dedicated fitness area.
Think of it in the same way as when you were working in an office, you would have a dedicated work area that you go to while you’re working. After work you would have a dedicated area for your workout, for example a gym or the trails.
At home you can get into the mindset of I’m not going to work even though you are within your home setting. The same applies to have any dedicated fitness area that you go to to do your workout. This means moving to that part of the house with exercise happens.
Try Some Different Exercises
Because you have your dedicated work out space at home, one of the ways to be able to keep these type of spaces more interesting and exciting is to do something new and different from the exercises that you might otherwise do at the gym.
By bringing in different types of exercises into your home workout environment you will be able to keep things fresh and interesting while you are still in the same home-space.
Find Ways To Hold Yourself Accountable
It is often easy to get stuck down into hours and hours of work routine especially when you’re working from home. So it is vital to find various ways of holding yourself accountable to your fitness goals.
One of the ways you can do that is using some sort of a fitness tracking system that measures how many steps you’ve walked, or you can look how many burpees you’ve done, how many minutes of planks you have been able to hold.
Have some way of being able to set yourself a benchmark and try and better that each and every day.
Wear Clothes You Can Exercise In
If you’re not going to be involved in zoom meetings, instead of deciding to do your work from home while wearing your pajamas Like I mentioned earlier, rather get yourself changed into the type of clothes that you can do your workout in.
By working in exercise clothes it becomes harder to make up excuses of why you can’t get away from your desk for a workout.
For instance, I am sitting here typing this in my running gear. There is a cap hanging on a hook above my desk and my hydration pack and fully charged ear pods are by the front door. Thirty minutes from now I will be out and on my run.
Walk Barefoot When Possible
One of the things that you can do when you working from home without any colleagues walking in and out on you all the time is to walk around barefoot.
As a trail runner or a runner in general walking barefoot strengthens the muscles and tendons of your feet which will help to improve your running over the long term.
Stretch Or Walk While Taking Calls
If you are able to be using something like a cordless headset for taking calls then use that time while you’re making calls to be able to walk some of your daily steps or do a couple of stretches.
If you are brave and are sure that you won’t yelp out in pain you could even multitask making calls while using the foam roller. My poker-face is not good enough to pull that off but you are welcome to try.
Keep It Fun
One important factor to remember is that irrespective of whether your exercise is during breaks between work or your early morning run, keep that aspect of your day as fun as possible.
The last thing that you want to have while you are working from home is to make your workout time feel like a chore or a grind that you need to get through.
Keep your workouts and your time out running as fun as possible. That way you can be using them as a reward for getting through a block of work within a certain specific goal time. The quicker you get through a certain block of work, the more time you can spend on your run or workout.
Getting out on the trails for a run is my way of rewarding myself for getting through a block of work. I come back mentally refreshed so that after I’ve been through the shower I’m ready to tackle the remainder of my workday.
Let me know in the comments about how you get your workouts in around your flexible working-from-home schedule. I’ll read them and reply when I get back from my run.