Are you throwing away 450 training session a year? I was.
My gym was just 20 minutes away but in a year I discovered I had lost over 450 potential training sessions seating in my car.
How many calories do you burn driving to the gym? How many calories does the car burn?
Had I walked to the gym, I could have benefited from 40 minutes extra training on each visit, but I chose to sit in a car when I should have chosen a gym nearer home.
Sometimes it was even worse, I wasted over an hour because of the traffic. I spent £3 on petrol on every visit to the gym. Minimum wage per hour is around £6 after tax and NI deduction. Meaning if I was on minimum wage, I would be wasting another 30 minutes, as I had to work 30 minutes in order to pay for my petrol. That is not even taking into account my car insurance, taxation and stuff.
So in theory, I will be spending a total of 156 hours working, to earn money to cover the cost of traveling to my gym.
Taking into account a very optimistic 10 minutes, for getting dressed, getting in the car, parking the car, changing at gym, not even taking into account the shower time, then you are wasting 26 days each year on the gym journey alone. All that adds up to 468 hours. I forgot to mention the hours you have to work to pay for your gym membership too.
In my opinion, if your gym is more than 15 minutes’ drive away, your wasting too much training time.
There is one exception, if you can make the journey part of your workout, e.g. run or cycle to and from the gym, then you are not wasting any time.
If your journey takes a total of 30 minutes by car, here are some ways you could have better used those lost 30 minutes:
- Tidy up the house
- Prepare a meal
- Watch an episode of SouthPark
- Work on your mobility
- Do a full Yoga workout
- Do a high intensity CrossFit workout
Thirty minutes travel means 3 hours a week. In three hours you can:
Edit several video clips
Design a fully functional WordPress website from scratch
Do your grocery shopping followed by a haircut
Read several chapters of an average size book
Watch Star Wars
Prepare your meals for the whole week
Each minute of travel equals to …. Hours lost in a week.
If your gym is a long way away, but you really want to go, I suggest working out away from the gym half the time and spending the other half using the gym.
There are plenty of workouts which can be done outside the gym. These include body weight workouts and cardiovascular workouts such as running and cycling.
Find more home workouts on our home workout section.
For the purposes of this article, days are calculated as 18 workout hours, 8 sleep hours and 6 workouts per week.