Over thirty years of coaching I have heard every version of the same sentence. I do not have enough time. Work has been relentless. The commute is exhausting. The children need me in the evenings. There is simply nothing left in the tank by the time everything else is done. I have heard it from executives and teachers, from parents and students, from people in their twenties and people in their fifties. The words change slightly. The meaning never does.
And my response, delivered with as much empathy and as little judgement as I can manage, has always been the same: you have the time. You are simply spending it on something else.
The Two-Hour Reality
Let us be honest about the actual commitment first, because glossing over it does nobody any favours. Forty-five minutes is how long a well-structured training session takes. It is not the whole story. By the time you travel to the gym, get changed, complete the session, shower and travel home, you are looking at closer to two hours door to door. That is the reality for the vast majority of people training at a commercial gym, and pretending otherwise is the kind of optimistic nonsense that sets people up to feel they have failed before they have started.
Two hours. Three times a week. Six hours out of the one hundred and sixty-eight that every week contains. That is three and a half per cent of your time. Not forty-five minutes. Two hours. And it is still — emphatically, unambiguously — worth it.
Where the Time Actually Goes
Most people find two hours for the pub on a Friday without negotiating it into their schedule, without planning around it, without wondering whether they can fit it in. It simply happens because they want it to happen. They find two hours for box sets. They find time for scrolling through their phone in the evening — not once but repeatedly, across the course of a week, in increments that add up to far more than six hours without anyone noticing.
I say this not to criticise any of those things. The pub after a hard week serves a genuine purpose. Social connection, decompression, the simple pleasure of company — these matter. But the time exists. It is not missing. It is allocated to other things, and the question is whether any of those things will serve you as well, ten years from now, as consistent training will.
"The difference is not time — it is priority. That is the honest answer, and it is the only one worth giving."
— oldschoolPT
The Pub as Reward — and What the Gym Actually Offers
A cold pint on a Friday afternoon is a reward. That feeling is real, it is immediate, and it is entirely understandable. The brain responds to it quickly. The pleasure is instant. And that is precisely the problem when comparing it to exercise, because the rewards that training produces are not instant in the same way. They are delayed slightly, and they require consistency before they become obvious to the person experiencing them.
But they are real. They are, in fact, physiologically measurable in ways that a pint on a Friday is not. The endorphin release after a hard training session is well documented in exercise science. The improvement in sleep quality that follows consistent training is well documented. The increase in energy, the improvement in mood, the clarity of thought — all of it is real, all of it is evidence-based, and all of it compounds over time in a way that the Friday pint simply does not.
Once you have trained consistently for four to six weeks, you will not need anyone to explain this to you. You will feel it. The session that once felt like an obligation will begin to feel like the thing that holds the rest of the week together. That shift does not happen immediately. But it happens, reliably, for almost everyone who commits long enough to experience it.
If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail
There is a phrase that has been used in coaching and sport for generations, and it remains as relevant today as it has ever been. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. The vast majority of people who struggle to train consistently are not failing because of a lack of motivation or a lack of willpower. They are failing because they have never actually committed the sessions to their week in the same concrete way that they commit to everything else.
A meeting goes in the diary. A dental appointment goes in the diary. A commitment to a friend goes in the diary. Training is treated as something that will happen if there is time left over — and there is never time left over, because life always fills whatever space is available to it. The solution is not to find the time. It is to claim it in advance and protect it.
Decide on your training days now. Not later, not when things calm down at work, not after the holidays. Now. Put them in the diary as you would any other appointment. Whether you train at six in the morning before the rest of the world is awake, at lunchtime, or in the evening after work — the specific time matters far less than the fact that it is fixed, it is planned, and it happens.
On the subject of timing — most commercial gyms now offer twenty-four-hour access, and whilst I understand the commercial logic behind that decision, I would always recommend training at a reasonable hour when the body is properly awake and the energy systems are functioning as they should. If a gym opens at six in the morning, that is early enough for even the most committed amongst us. The middle of the night is not training — it is sleep deprivation with weights.
The Nation That Plans to Fail
We are, and I say this with genuine affection rather than criticism, a nation that has become extraordinarily good at finding reasons not to do things. Fitness sits near the top of that list. The irony is that the investment is so small relative to the return — six hours of your week in exchange for better energy, better sleep, better body composition, better mental health, and the quiet, unspoken confidence that comes from knowing you are doing something that the majority of people around you are not.
That confidence is not arrogance. It is the natural result of showing up for yourself, repeatedly, over a long period of time. It is the result of choosing the gym on a Wednesday evening when the sofa was available and the television was on. It accumulates slowly, in the same way that fitness itself accumulates — invisibly at first, and then unmistakably.
"Time waits for no-one. You will not find it — you have to make it."
— oldschoolPT
The cold pint on Friday will still be there. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. But so will the training session on Wednesday. The question is simply which one you plan for.
