How can I stay in shape when time is always tugging me?

QIt seems that the more you work from home the less time you have for yourself. What tips do you have to stay in shape on a serious time budget?

AHolbourne Advisory wrote on its blog two years ago: “Technology has blurred the lines between where we work and where we live, allowing our workplace to encroach on our home life.”

Fair enough. Throw in a virus, send a country home and voila … you have an always-on culture on steroids.

It went on to say: “Apart from the effect this is having on family life, recent studies have shown that one of the negative effects of mobile e-mail is employee’s ‘anticipatory stress’

— the stress caused by the expectation that they need to respond to an after-hours work request.

“This ‘always-on’ or always working mode is then leading to burn out because people are not ever switching off or truly resting.”

Nor exercising, it seems. The Water Cooler is not immune to stress and long hours. In fact, practising what you preach can be hard when the proposal is due or your best-laid plans come unstuck.

Here’s the thing though. You are an intelligent, autonomous being. We assume this because you’re reading Business Day. Your device may well be semiautonomous but, surprisingly, it cannot work if you don’t switch it on.

Only the brave — or corporate slave — will be flying around the country from level 3, so why not put your cellphone’s airplane mode to good use while investing in some good old-fashioned exercise.

For at least a decade, articles and videos promoting short, effective workouts have been more in-your-face than blackmarket cigarettes of late, yet for some reason it appears easier to find a guy who knows a guy who has two cartons of Savannah, than someone who is still doing Tabata.

Tabata training — or if you want to sound particularly au fait with fitness, Tabata protocol

— is a type of high-intensity interval training that originated in the early 1990s as a result of research conducted by Japanese scientist Izumi Tabata.

He and his team at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Japan studied whether short bursts of high-intensity training conditioned the body better than continuous steadystate cardio.

In summary, long-duration, lower-intensity training improves your aerobic energy system. Tabata involves all energy systems and benefits trainees both aerobically and anaerobically, and so they maintain or even build muscle while losing fat.

Read about these energy systems on BusinessLIVE in the article called: “How to get past the brick wall in your training”.

A Tabata workout involves 20 seconds of all-out, maximum-intensity exercise, followed by 10 seconds rest, repeated eight times. That’s four minutes of your life.

The second half of the workout, if done at the correct intensity, will feel like Armageddon arrived early. The guaranteed lactic acid build-up and gasping for air may sound like torture to some, but for the fitness fanatics among us, it is nirvana. Why? Because we know what that feeling signifies: results.

After your four minutes, take a break, and repeat a few more four-minute blocks and you will find that 20 minutes in total is more than enough time.

The types of exercise you can do include burpees, running on the spot, high knees, mountain climbers, stationary bike, running, jump squats and jump lunges. Be creative and think calisthenics.

Perform those 20 seconds with everything you have — full intensity, back off for 10 seconds, and go again. Avoid weights or exercises that are more likely to injure you when you are fatigued. Shape magazine called Tabata the four-minute miracle fatburning workout.

Ultimately, you’re in charge of your smartphone. Turn it off for 20 minutes.

Or turn on Houseparty, Zoom, Teams, Hangouts, Skype, Facetime, Facebook Live or any other invasive piece of technology and host a highpaced meeting with family and friends that will benefit everyone.