Hard Truth → If You Are Too Busy …
to Workout You Are Too Busy!

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #527: Hard Truth → If You Are Too Busy to Workout, You Are Too Busy!

Jeff Sanders
Productivity without health is a ticking time bomb.

Health without productivity is a fantasy.

On the other hand, a healthy and productive lifestyle is a goldmine of possibility.

We just have to find a way to make it happen.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 527.

Hard Truth.

If you are too busy to work out, you are too busy.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful, lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

In the episode this week, I'll break down why fitness is not an optional activity reserved for only a few of us, why your schedule can no longer be an excuse to stop you from moving your body every day, and a few practical strategies to bring fitness into your life even on the most chaotic calendars.

Let's get to it.

I work out 5-7 days a week.

I'm not the world's strongest or fastest in anything.

I have no records to brag about.

I have nothing really to show you that would impress you by way of my own fitness results.

However, I do work out 5-7 days a week with few exceptions.

I lift weights, sit in the sauna, hike in the woods, run in my neighborhood, stretch and practice yoga, hang upside down with gravity boots, and find nearly any way I can to keep moving my body every day.

I'm also a busy guy.

I run a business, I have a wife, two kids, a house, I have hobbies, I travel, I have problems to solve, curveballs to address, and stressful messes to clean up all the time.

However, I still work out 5-7 days a week.

I wake up early to run or walk in my neighborhood.

I take my daughters to the gym after daycare and school for an afternoon lift and sauna session.

I hike during my work day when I could be, well, working I guess.

I trade off time with my wife on the weekends so I can hike and run on the trails here in Nashville.

When my daughters visit their grandparents in Missouri, I go with them and bring my gym bag so I can use their gym in their town and hike their trails.

I work out 5-7 days a week.

It's not just what I do, it is who I am.

I, Jeff Sanders, am a guy who works out.

I exercise.

I prioritize it.

Love it.

Work on it.

Look forward to it.

And thrive because of it.

I work out 5-7 days a week.

This was not always true.

And in some seasons of my life, it isn't.

Because I'm human.

I get lazy.

I get busy.

I find excuses to sleep in or work late.

I say yes when I should say no and vice versa.

And yes, I allow others to dictate my schedule when I should be flipping the script on them.

Despite these shortcomings and temporary setbacks, I work out 5-7 days a week.

I think you get my point.

The hard truth of the episode this week couldn't be more clear.

If you are too busy to work out, you are too busy.

I've had a slide in my presentations for years.

Whenever I give a live talk, this slide is in every single one of them.

All of them.

I don't even care if it relates to the topic.

This is a slide I put in every single presentation and I find a way to work it in.

Because I believe in this so strongly.

And it's so telling when you ask someone about their priorities.

I don't really care about what you're going to say next because of course the results speak for themselves.

Do you work out yes or no?

Have you worked out recently?

How often have you worked out?

Let me see your workout calendar and you should have one.

A database of all the previous workouts you've done, the progress you've made.

I say all of this to say no one has to have these things.

These things aren't true.

This is 100% me just projecting my own vision of reality.

However, it doesn't take away from the truth.

And the truth is if you are not prioritizing exercise, if you're not taking care of your body, you're going to see the results of those decisions or that just reality of where you are.

Fitness is not optional.

And ultimately your excuses just don't matter.

Why?

Because your body doesn't care about your work schedule.

Your heart doesn't care about your calendar.

Your muscles don't care about your meetings.

Your brain doesn't care about your BS.

If you don't work out, you don't work out and you get the results of that lifestyle.

If you skip the gym again and again and again, it becomes a habit and you get the results of that habit.

If you stay up late watching TV, having a glass of wine or going out, which then causes you to sleep in yet again, missing your early morning window to work out, you get the results of those choices.

Here's a key thing to all of this.

I'm not here to judge you on that because I do all of those things.

Those are my habits I just listed to you just then.

All of those things about skipping the gym and staying up late and drinking wine at night, I am guilty of all these things.

These are my norms, my excuses.

And if I want new results, I have to change.

If I want a new story, I'm the one who gets to tell that.

Now, it does not take away from that reality I just said about I work out five to seven days a week because that's still true.

In the middle of the excuses, in the middle of the busyness, in the middle of the chaos, despite all that could be going against me, the commitment is still there.

The prioritization and willingness to address the reality that I freaking love exercise and not because I'm a worker-outer freak, it's just because it's so good.

It's so beneficial.

It relieves stress and it makes me feel better.

There's an emotional high that comes from it.

It's fantastic, especially when you do things you love.

And yeah, there's some workouts that I do that I don't love, I know just are helpful.

There's others that I absolutely just can't get enough of and wish I had more time for.

All that to say that the exercise is just a central role, it's a cornerstone.

In all the things I'm scheduling and prioritizing and working so hard on, if we go back a couple episodes of this podcast, I recently discussed my weekly review and how the very first thing that I schedule are my fitness, the habits, the blocks of time, the gym trips, the hiking, the trail running, all of it.

That's what gets scheduled first before everything else because that's how I work out five to seven days a week.

It's the first thing on the calendar, not the last thing.

It's the priority, not the afterthought.

It's the thing, not a thing.

If that becomes your reality, then all of a sudden you have found yourself in a position to make this work.

And that's what we want, right?

This episode sounds kind of accusatory.

I'm not here to point fingers and judge and blame.

No, no, no, no.

I'm here to remind myself how valuable this is.

And yes, you as well, because it's that good.

Fitness is that good.

And it's not an activity reserved for professional athletes.

Fitness is for all of us because this is true, whether you believe this or not, you are an athlete.

You are.

Now, whether you choose to use your athletic skills or not is up to you, but you are an athlete.

And I think the identity thing here is super important because once you identify as a runner, a swimmer, a triathlete, a yogi, once you identify with that, all bets are off.

You just changed your whole life.

You just changed every bit of your perspective on how you live because a great athlete, a great yogi, a great swimmer, a great triathlete, marathon runner, mountain climber is going to make different choices and prioritize those activities.

You are an athlete.

We just need to make sure that you live out that reality.

Now, in the process of all of this, fitness is not an all or nothing proposition.

You do not have to commit to working out seven days a week for the rest of your life.

That's not what this is.

You can and probably should start and stay very small, working out in the margins, right?

Finding the time when it works for you.

It's where it begins.

It begins when it's convenient.

It begins when it's easy.

And you make the most of the calendar that's right in front of you because we're not trying to sign up for a triathlon on the first day back at the gym, right?

Fitness is not going to be something where it's a formal spin class at the gym or a sanctioned marathon in some major city.

Fitness is something that you do every day.

It's whether you have a standing desk at your office or not.

It's whether you take walk breaks during your lunch break.

It's whether or not you do make time to go to a gym or a park or wake up early to stretch.

Fitness is part of life.

It's built into the thing you're doing, taking a longer commute to work, biking to work when you can.

I used to walk two miles to and from work.

I lived in Boston many years ago.

I had the option of the train and I chose to walk on most days, right?

Sometimes life is that obvious.

You can choose one thing or another.

If that's the case, then we're going to make the choice to be more fit, right?

We're going to bake it in when we can, right?

Yes, because that's what we're going for is a life where fitness is valuable, where the benefits are real because we live the life that brings about those results because we want it.

We desire it.

We prioritize it.

Fitness is beautiful.

Moving your body is fantastic.

Feeling better is feeling better and you get to feel better when you address those issues, those stiffness and soreness and goofiness and weakness.

We get to address all of that in the exercise.

We get to bring about some positive emotions from this.

It's awesome.

I've got to say, it's fantastic.

I have a big question for you that I think has helped me a lot in the past.

When you were fit, let's go with that as an example.

When you were fit, what was different?

What I'm referring to here is let's think back to a time in your life when you were likely more fit than you are today and maybe decades ago, but there's a good chance you had a season of life that was stellar, a season of life where things were really good.

You were trim, fit, athletic, maybe you had a six pack, who knows?

A season of life, maybe you're very young, this is true, but you had a season where this was true.

You were fit and it was awesome.

What was different then?

What did you actually do?

Who were you with?

How often did you move or lift, dance, run, stretch, swim, sweat?

What was going on?

What was true about your life then?

Because that's going to give you a really strong indication of what you can bring back to your present day so your most fit self can then become who you are now.

You don't have to be your most fit self as a past tense perspective.

It might be who you're going to be very soon.

I know a lot of people who will say definitively that they found their best fitness in life in their mid 40s or early 50s.

They didn't even discover that they could be fit until later in life and then when they prioritized it, they blew their own mind because the fitness took over and redefined their reality.

That can be true for you too.

How can you bring back your most fit self to the present moment?

How can your current calendar reflect those ideals and fitness goals?

How can you get more out of what you already have?

I want to shift now and really focus on how we can build fitness into what would be a chaotic calendar, what would be a crazy, crazy lifestyle.

The first thing I mentioned earlier, this concept of identifying as an athlete today.

Identity is everything.

Let's go back to my college days for a second.

My junior year of college, I had a study abroad semester in Prague.

I spent about three and a half months in Eastern Europe doing everything you could possibly imagine that a college student would do in Eastern Europe.

I was drunk all the time, just to put it frankly.

I was not healthy.

I made every poor decision one could possibly make for three and a half straight months.

When I came back from that trip, I had one mission.

I had to re-find myself.

I had to bring back the better version of me that I had just ditched for three and a half months.

What I chose to do then was run.

My initial perspective was, "I'm going to try running on a treadmill for five minutes a day."

That was it.

That was the only goal, five minutes a day on the treadmill.

By the end of that summer, I was running five miles a day.

That's all it took.

Three months after I came back from my three-month trip, I had completely reinvented my body.

It started with five minutes a day.

I identified as a runner in order to make that happen.

I identified as someone who ...

There was an athlete buried somewhere beneath all of the blubber that I had acquired, all of the nonsense that I had created.

The trip was awesome.

I'm not going to deny my amazing fun that I had, but I destroyed myself in the process.

I knew I wanted to re-find myself.

I knew that I had the opportunity to do so, and I took it.

Every day, step by step, little workout by little workout, I identified as someone who was on a new path.

Identified as someone who could rebuild his life and trajectory.

Five minutes on the treadmill per day became 10, 10, 15, 15 to 20.

Next thing you know, I'm running five miles a day, probably four to five days a week by the end of that summer.

Identifying as a runner then led to my discovery that maybe if I could run five miles, I could run 10.

One of my friends decided that he would join me, and we began to train with long distance running my senior year of college.

No, we didn't get super far.

I think our longest run together was probably 15-ish miles, but that was by far the longest I'd ever run, and it proved to me that if I can run 15 miles in a chunk, one big session, I can do a marathon.

Oh, yeah, I could totally do that.

Now, I didn't run my first marathon until about two years later after I moved to Boston.

I began to train much more hardcore then and really latched on to the identity of not just a runner, but a marathoner.

I had this mission in mind of saying, "If I'm a runner, if this is true, what would a runner do?

When would I run?

How often would I run?

How far would I run?

How fast would I run?

What would I wear?

How often would I sign up for races?"

All of a sudden, my life became consumed with running, just absolutely obsessed with it.

I would spend my days at work and my nights and weekends literally running in every possible direction.

It was all I did for a long time.

I absolutely loved it.

It was fantastic.

I was getting in phenomenal shape.

I wound up running my very first marathon in Providence, Rhode Island, very soon after that.

It changed my life.

I then had another break for a while.

My wife and I moved to Nashville.

I found myself once again training for a marathon, but this time as a trail runner.

I discovered the trails of Middle Tennessee here in Nashville.

That redefined my love of running and redefined my identity as an athlete.

All of a sudden now, I'm a trail marathoner, trail runner, someone who wants to spend his time in nature as much as possible.

I began to build fitness into my messy and chaotic calendar because it was my priority.

It was the thing I was all about.

Yeah, I had a full-time job.

I had a side business that later on became what I do today.

I had these races to train for and runs to prepare for and super long runs on the weekends.

I got into ultra marathon running at this point, like beyond a marathon, and really began to push myself all up until I broke my foot because I pushed too hard.

That's a whole different story.

The point is that I identified extraordinarily so with this concept that I am a runner and because of that, I will do all the things a runner does and get the results a runner gets.

But ultimately, I wasn't trying to win any races.

I wasn't trying to compete with anyone other than myself.

I kept a chart of some of my personal records just out of sheer curiosity.

There's some trails here nearby where I know my fastest time on those trails.

I have a record of what those are, but I'm not trying to beat them all the time.

I just enjoy the fact that as a runner, I've run a lot in a lot of places for a lot of reasons, and it's just part of who I am and what I've done and what I want to do in the future.

But in order for any of this to be possible, in order for running to define my life, to be baked into who I am, baked into what I do, the calendar reflects all of it.

Nobody trains for endurance athletics of any kind, triathlons, ultra marathons, big events, without an extraordinary amount of time committed to it.

Your calendar will dictate what you're able to give it, and you get to choose what this looks like.

Whether you run at 5 a.m. or 5 p.m. or run on the weekends or nights or during the middle of the workday with a long lunch break, all these possibilities exist.

So how are you going to make it happen?

How is it possible for you to do more than you're doing now?

Not just identifying with the title of an athlete, the title of a swimmer, a mountain climber, a cyclist, but how does that then translate into the practicality of your day-to-day?

What I'm directly arguing is not only that fitness and exercise are extraordinarily valuable, but that being too busy is bad.

Being too busy is detrimental to your best self.

That if your life is consumed by things you don't want it to be consumed by, you're not going to live out your fullest potential.

No, no, not everyone defines their life as an athlete.

Not everyone defines their life through the lens of fitness.

I'm not arguing you need to.

But I am arguing that if you are too busy to take care of yourself, that that's going to backfire in a way that nothing else can compete with.

That all of this is based on the idea that healthy people tend to have better results that they want.

More energy, more vitality, more endurance, more ability to do the goals they've set out to do.

Healthy and vibrant people tend to be more energetic, more passionate, more positive, more of my kind of people.

I use that from a very specific lens.

When I first discovered I was a runner, I was alone.

I was just a guy by himself out for a run.

Runners tend to be very solo, isolated people until you get them in a group and then holy cow, watch out.

When I went to my very first group running event, which I believe was a 5K, just a competitive 5K in Boston, I was surrounded for the first time by other people like me.

People just ran for fun and wanted to do more of it, but do it in a competition.

I discovered for the very first time how awesome runners are as people, how fricking positive they are, how excited they are to say hello to total strangers all the time.

I found a group of people that I identified with and loved, and they were total strangers to me, and they were awesome.

All of a sudden, it changed my identity of not just I'm a runner, but I'm part of a group.

I'm part of a community.

I'm a member of this tribe.

How much better is that than being some guy by himself out to just do some vigorous exercise because this is good for me because a podcaster told me to do this?

That's not it.

No, no, no, no.

No, it's just like I'm doing this because man, why wouldn't I?

Why wouldn't I do this?

Isn't that awesome?

I want to live in that kind of a life where those are the kinds of experiences that I have.

I can't have those kinds of experiences if I don't first do the work required to bake it into my life, put it on the calendar, commit to it, build that foundation of fitness so that then I can thrive as things begin to get easier because I'm more fit, and all of a sudden, it begins to make a whole lot more sense.

If you want to build fitness into a chaotic calendar, it has nothing to do with the chaos of the calendar, nothing.

It has everything to do with who are you.

Are you an athlete?

Are you a runner?

Are you someone who's going to say yes to these things or not?

Because if you're not going to latch on to identity, the calendar is just a secondary thing.

Who cares?

But if you are going to latch on to that identity, you are going to make that part of who you are.

It is you.

The calendar will solve itself because you're going to realize very quickly there are things on your calendar that do not fit with your new identity.

There are things you've been saying yes to that no longer align to who you are now, and those things are gone instantly, poof, deleted.

What replaces them are all these new positive, awesome actions.

It's a swap.

That's all that's happening.

Time is fixed.

We can't add more hours to our day or our week, but we can swap things out, and the swap is going to change your life.

We flip the activities around, and all of a sudden, you're doing activities you love.

Otherwise, you're going to skip them.

You do things you love, and it reinforces itself, and then you want to do more of it because it just begs itself to be done again and again and again, whether that is, name the activity, swimming, running, bodybuilding, whatever the case is.

From my perspective, you nail down the identity.

You choose those activities that you love.

You bake them into your calendar, but then we have to do more than just baking it in.

It has to become a routine.

It has to be the kind of activity that is being small.

It scales over time.

To get to that goal I was talking about before of five to seven days a week, well, that's going to require habitual planning, recurring, guaranteed time on the calendar for very specific reasons.

This is a question of what do you really value, and how can you guarantee it's baked in?

I'm going to argue the best way to do this is start incredibly small, 10 minutes a day, five minutes a day.

We start with the kind of thing that's non-negotiable.

Of course you have five minutes a day.

Everyone does.

That's where it begins because that's where you plant the seed for that growth.

That's where the whole thing germinates.

I mean, a lot of farming analogies here, but that's where it starts, and it builds from there.

You walk a little bit.

You stretch a little bit.

You do a few pushups.

Whatever it is, you can do in five minutes.

Small activities.

We're not trying to break records here.

We're not trying to do anything abnormal or crazy.

We're trying to establish a new rhythm, a new identity, a new normal.

Once that new normal is in place, it's so much easier to expand it, grow it, change it, get creative with your calendar, find ways to move things around.

Your calendar as it is now is not fixed.

Most likely it can be changed and will change.

The question becomes, what will it change into?

That's where we get to crafting the calendar around your fitness time.

This is where things begin to scale.

Once you have this new normal, you've baked in this habitual nature of your fitness time.

Well, now all of a sudden you might get to the point where I have been for a while, which is prioritizing your fitness so strongly that you craft your work around your fitness.

This is not always possible based upon work schedules.

I do understand that.

But if you can get to this point where fitness begins to define your best days, you're going to know it because your calendar reflects it.

Where the other activities you have scheduled, even on the weekends or evenings or whatever the case may be, are scheduled around your fitness time.

Because your fitness time is your first time, first priority, first thing you do.

And then the final component here is where you ramp up to something extraordinary, a grand fitness goal, an adventure you're going to go on, a tall mountain you're going to climb, a long race you're going to compete in, lifting a weight you never imagined was possible where you become this elite version of yourself that you always knew was there but never gave the chance to actually fully express itself.

This is where there's no longer an excuse about finding time.

That's long gone.

You're now at a place where, man, you have done something extraordinary.

And then it's just baked into who you are.

And the identity question is no longer there.

The excuses are just, no, no, you are there.

You're in it.

Imagine if that was true.

Imagine if that was true where this whole concept of if you're too busy to work out, you're too busy, you're like, "Pshaw, I work out all the time.

It's just what I do.

And I love it.

And I'm good at it.

That's the place that I like to be."

Or "It is my priority because I know how much better I am because of it.

I know the benefits it brings me."

And this idea that I would not prioritize it just seems silly at this point because it really is that good.

And for the action step this week, work out anyway.

I don't care how busy you are.

I don't care how busy you think you are.

I don't care how busy you have been or you are today or you will be tomorrow.

Let me rephrase that.

It's not that I don't care.

Your body doesn't care.

Whether you have an excuse or not, your body needs to move.

It needs to breathe and stretch and flex and lift and run and dance and swim and sweat and thrive with all its potential.

Let your body do what it does best.

Now you can subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app or become a VIP member of the 5AM Miracle community by getting the premium ad-free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

And that's all I've got for you here on the 5AM Miracle Podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and the fun begins bright and early.

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