Training While Working From Home
It's been harder than any of us expected to keep training while working from home, but Neil Cooper has some helpful tips to boost activity.
Training While Working From Home
https://www.contoursrun.co.uk/training-while-working-from-home
by Neil Cooper
The global pandemic has forced numerous changes to the way we live our lives. Social distancing, lockdown, furlough and facemasks have become the words of 2020. Another big change is the increase in the number of people that are working from home.
Working from home has meant that we have had to overcome new challenges, such as mastering the use of virtual meeting software and creating a comfortable working environment, but it has also created the potential for a significant silver lining.
When I ask athletes for the biggest barrier to training, the answer is usually that they have a lack of time. Balancing work, family and training is a real challenge for many people.
Working from home gives you the opportunity to claim some time back by eliminating the daily commute to the workplace. In the UK, the average worker spends 58 minutes a day commuting, so this is a big win.
However, studies suggest that many people have struggled to take advantage of this potential for time saving and perhaps haven’t been able to continue with or increase their training.
Ask yourself this: are you working from home, or are you now living at work? Without the definitive separation of the commute between home life and work life, the two can merge together.
Many people are now working longer hours, unable to resist the temptation to finish off a document or answer one more e-mail. Before you know it, the “commute time” you have saved has been spent working. Studies suggest that this is unproductive work.
When people do gain the free time, it’s often not spent productively. Studies show that this time is often spent on activities known as passive leisure, such as spending time on social media. Although passive leisure does help people to relax, it’s not as effective as active leisure when promoting happiness.
For endurance athletes, good time management when working from home can result in big gains. For several years, some of the best endurance runners have come from Kenya. Instead of doing one long training session, they often do multiple shorter sessions in a day. So, try this Kenyan-inspired training day that is very popular with athletes I coach.
This session will not only help you structure your work day, it will help your training and really improve your running. To add variety, you can change the interval session and the distances. To make it even better, why not meet a friend to share these sessions with. Research does suggest short social interactions can improve your wellbeing.
Above all, stay safe and enjoy your training.