The Big 3: Family, Work, & Rest

There’s a good chance that you have other priorities outside of fitness.

In fact, there’s a really really realllllly good chance that you have many other priorities outside of fitness.

I’ve been a personal trainer and nutrition coach for a long time, and I’ve learned a thing or two about the cadence of my clients’ lives – most relevant here is that working out and eating well is often more akin to an obligation and less so to a hobby.

There are all sorts of physical, mental, and spiritual benefits to the pursuit of better fitness of course, but I’m not naive enough to tell my clients to eat, sleep, and breathe all things fitness – it simply doesn’t work that way, as I’m sure you can attest.

Most of my clients are parents with young kids, and that already tells you a lot about what kinds of obstacles we tend to navigate. There are plenty of time, energy, and attention constraints that come into play, and the ebb and flow of program flexibility is of utmost importance for many of them.

I like to teach my clients that fitness is a tool. It’s a multi-tool that can be used in all areas of your life, no matter who you are or what you do. It’s worth investing in this tool and learning how to use it because it simply makes everything else that much easier: improved fitness means your body is better equipped to handle both your day-to-day and once-in-a-blue-moon tasks.

Time is one of the most valuable assets that we each have at our disposal, and it often feels like it’s the one we have to least of and the least control over. While both of those may be true to an extent, it is always in our best interest to take a good, honest look at how we use our time in order to make sure we aren’t selling ourselves short from our full potential. This is certainly true in fitness: a great workout program does not need to consume all your free time, and there are many ways to condense your workout time while improving the benefits you reap from it. 

That being said, let’s take a quick look at your time spent outside of your fitness endeavors. If you’re here reading this post, there’s a really, really, realllllly good chance that you share the same big 3 time priorities that is common across my coaching clients: family, work, and rest.

(As a head’s up, this post is not going to conclude with a big list of takeaway tasks, questions, or assignments. This is not a “how to” guide, so much as it is a call to consider how you spend and distribute your time. We all have the same 24 hours each day to spend, and it’s worth looking at how your spending habits are either helping or hurting you.)

Family

Time spent with family and on family matters is a bit tricky sometimes. On one hand, you may catch yourself talking about how you would love to spend more time with your family – your significant other, your kids, maybe your parents or siblings. On the other hand, an honest investigation might reveal that we have plenty of opportunities to spend this time with family that are simply wasted on things that aren’t all that important. A good place to start is looking at your screen time trends. Most of that time is probably mindless scrolling and envying what our friends are up to, all while your own family is just a room or phone call away. 

From my experience working with dozens of people who want to spend more time with family, it would appear that the “solution” isn’t always or even usually trying to find or create more time with spouses and kids – it’s usually a matter of finding or creating better time with them. Distraction-free (screen-free!) time is where parents and spouses will find true enjoyment in one another’s company. Just like in your work, your fitness, and your faith, doing more is not inherently the best route. Quality is at least as important as quantity.

Work

Not surprisingly, this is the category that inherently takes up much of our time which can leave us feeling helpless to change anything. If you have a 9 hour work day with a half hour commute each way, that’s potentially a solid 10 out of your 24 hour day spent on your work. Repeat that 5 times over throughout the week, and you’re looking at 50+ hours of time that must be spent for your family, but not with your family. 

Maybe you feel like you have the opposite issue – you either work from home, or your job is taking care of your kids and home. There’s no real escape or separation between family and work, and you’re longing for more rest, which is the third category. In any case, work can feel incredibly consuming even when you’re off the clock. It’s not always within our power to work less, but we do have the power to improve the mental side of our work life. We can increasingly choose to focus on work when we’re at work, and to focus on family when we’re at home with the family.

Rest

Everyone’s favorite subject, right? Talks about our need for rest and our simultaneous failure to prioritize it seldom lead to anything productive. But it’s still important not to beat around the bush here: we really struggle with rest sometimes! To be clear, rest is not just about sleeping, it’s not just about filling up our schedule with non-work activities, and it’s not just about vegging out on the couch in front of our phones or TV. Rest is intentional, and it looks different for everybody. Personally, Sundays are my day to fully rest, which often looks like gearing up for church then hanging out with my wife and daughter. It’s flexible and unstructured, which feels very restful for me. Toward the end of the day, I typically outline the big events and plans for the week, which feels like a restful and productive way to finish the week.

The Bible sets an example for making rest a true priority on both large and small scales. We see countless commands to take a Sabbath, or a weekly rest. On the other end, we also see many examples of Jesus taking smaller, daily rest periods which is also wise to emulate. Finding a time and (literal!) space to be quiet, alone, focused, or some combination of the three is a task worth tackling. it may take a few tries and continual adjustment to figure out what’s going to work for you, but the call is the let the gift of rest resurface as a higher priority in your life if it hasn’t already.