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For the person that made New Year’s resolutions to improve fitness, and likes to watch football, it was a tough start. It was tough to get a workout in when bowl games went from noon until 11:00 p.m. that night. If you were an early morning person, it might be OK. But being an early morning workout person after a New Year’s Eve celebration is a contradiction in willingness to be active.
I started thinking of my resolutions and ways to get a little exercise in between games. It starts with comfortable dress in workout sweats to watch the games. You need to limit the amount of chips, dip, snacks, beer, and tacos during this television marathon of football games. This can also apply to individuals that watch all the shows that go on for several hours.
Research has shown that doing exercise in small increments is almost as beneficial as doing exercise in one long session. If you think how much time the ads and time outs are in any game, or television shows, you get almost 20 minutes every hour. In football games, the sponsors not only have the timeouts the coaches call, but also mandatory television time outs,for commercials from the sponsors that are paying for the game. When you watch a game in person, or sometimes at the end of a commercial, you will see this “official” out on the field who has the responsibility to halt play until the commercials are over and the teams can start to play again. I am always amazed how 30-second timeouts take over three minutes to complete. I haven’t timed the two minute timeouts but it seems like five minutes, or more, is the standard length of time for the commercials.
The challenge is to find exercises that can be done in five-minute time frames. The time between quarters and at half time let you get a good workout in. For aerobic fitness exercises jumping rope and running in place are good. Looking at these exercises realistically shows that these are not used very frequently. To jump, or skip rope, takes a lot of space to not knock things off shelves, move people and furniture out of the way. Running in place is good if you can do it quietly and not thump, thump, the feet and disturb the rest of the people in the room wanting to discuss points of the game. One option is to play “head coach” of the team and pace back and forth around the room. It helps to use some arm signals at times to encourage the players to play better. This is an alternative to those watching the game with you who will let you pass in front of them throughout the game. It is advised to limit the shouting of instructions to the television players for the benefit of the other people in the room. Aerobic exercise is best done between games, at half time, and short sprints between quarters.
There is always the short bouts of exercise that can be done during the commercials. If you put a mat down on the floor you have that five minute time frame for a series of push up, sit ups, burpees, and squats. You can do pushups the first commercial break, sit ups during the second, squats for the third, and burpees after the fourth commercial. With all the many commercials in a game you can get a good number of sets in during a game.
For the really serious workout you can have a set of dumbbells on the floor and do an exercise during the commercials. Curls one time, overhead presses the next, deadlifts, squats, and even abdominal twists, for the time during commercials. If you have stairs near the television room this is even better. Walking up and down the stairs for five minutes can add up to over 40 minutes of aerobic exercise in a game. By standing on the bottom step you can do toe raises for the calf muscles. To get the most benefit from toe raises it is better to do a full range of motion movement instead of a quick bounce technique. Let the heel drop down as far as it will go, pause here for one second, then raise up as high as you can with the foot, and pause again. Doing a slow, and full range of motion, for a toe raise you will find that 15 – 20 repetitions is a good workout. If you have strong calves you might try doing this exercise one leg at a time. This slow, full range of motion, is a better exercise than the bouncing half range of motion where you might do 50 repetitions.
Stretching exercises can be an addition to include. It is difficult to do many of the stretching exercises and still watch the game. While there are a few that allow you to watch the game and stretch most are better performed during commercials and quarter breaks.
Whether you do exercises for all the games, or just one, depends on your level of fitness. If you can even exercise one game during every commercial, quarter breaks, half time, and game summary, that will be a good start to keeping that fitness resolution you made. I selected the one game I had the least interest in and went for a two mile walk. I only missed the first quarter of the game and was able to watch the rest of the game and not feel guilty about not working out. While most of the bowl games are over, there are still NFL playoffs, the NCAA Championship games, and there is always a basketball game on somewhere that can be used for “television exercise” sessions.
