Intern Year Survival Guide: Staying Active

If you're a resident in nearly any specialty, you've probably sat through at least one of those lectures where they told you how important it was to take care of your own health while working 80 hour weeks and learning all the medicine you didn't learn in med school. They say this like it's SO easy, but no one tells you how to do it.

You work 14 hours and then you're expected to come home, do the adult things you have to do like eat dinner, do dishes, and get ready for the next day AND read about medicine AND spend time with loved ones AND somehow fit exercise in that mix?

Seriously?

As people in medicine we're often really busy taking care of everyone else and the thing that always falls off the bottom of our to-do list is taking care of ourselves. We're not a priority. It's hard to put something like exercise high enough up on your list, especially when you're already tired.

Now, this isn't one of those things where I tell you "no matter how busy you are, there's always time to exercise". I think that statement is crap. That statement is for people who work normal 40 hour work weeks. Trust me, sometimes I work so many hours in one day that by the time I get home the only thing I have time to do is eat and fall right into bed.

Instead of giving you platitudes, I'm here to tell you the truth about taking care of yourself in the craziness of PGY1 year. The reality is that intern year you probably won't have the free time to train for a marathon, you won't be able to achieve your goal of going from benching the bar to bench pressing 300 pounds. The truth is that setting a solid goal to work out every day for an hour or two is probably not going to be doable.

The reality of intern year is that no matter how well intentioned you are at the beginning of the week you'll get stuck at work for an extra two hours you weren't counting on dealing with an urgent patient issue or you'll end up getting home too exhausted to even think about going out out for a run or hitting the gym.

But, there is time to do enough to keep yourself healthy! And instead of giving you encouraging motivational statements overlaid on pictures of girls with perfect makeup wearing running clothes, I'm going to give you real advice about how to fit a couple workouts a week into your 80-100 hour work weeks.

1. Set a reasonable goal. I aim to workout for half an hour three times a week. Even when I get home late I can tell myself that it's only 30 minutes. I can take 30 minutes before I shower and go to bed. I can make that happen. If you tell yourself that your workout would take two hours, when you're tired there's no way you'll put off sleep for two hours to workout. 
2. If you're busy, add activity during your normal daily flow to help you stay active! I bike to work. It's not far, but it adds a couple extra minutes of activity to my normal day. If you can bike or walk to work. this can easily become a whole or part of your workout for the day.
3. Add fun activities on your day off that are active. Sometimes it can be as simple as going for a walk with your dog or heading to the park or downtown with your significant other for a walk! These sorts of things make it easy to get your activity in and have fun on your day off instead of staying inside watching Netflix. Trust me, the lure of the couch is real on your days off, but you'll feel better if you get out and do something when you're not at the hospital. 
4. Use a tracker -- I have an apple watch and it's been great for reminding me of the days when I've been stuck in front of a computer all day working on patient issues. I feel like having something reminding you to get your steps in can be a good way to make me take the stairs when I'm walking between the floor and the OR. 
5. Be kind to yourself. When you've had a really hard day, feel free to go home and skip your planned workout when you really just can't face it and need some downtime instead. Things can wait. 
6. 10 minutes is better than 0. Even if all I do is get on my treadmill and run one mile, that's one extra mile that I hadn't done before. 
7. Cut out travel time. I've always found that the thing that annoyed me about working out was the fact that sometimes I had to spend a bunch of time going to and from the gym to workout. It felt like wasted time. I've found it's much easier to convince myself to workout if all I have to do is start. I have a treadmill or run outside to get my runs in. It saves me the 10 minutes it would take to get in my car and drive to the gym. Bodyweight exercises or yoga can easily be performed in your bedroom! The 20 minutes it would take me in transit can be 20 minutes spent actually on the workout. Every second counts when you only have a couple hours at home. 
8. Reward yourself. Often if I get to the end of the week and I made my workout goals for the week, on my day off I'll do something fun for me as a little treat, even if it's just walking to get a starbucks or picking up a pair of $2 fun socks when I was at target because I did something good for me. :) 
9. Find the time that works for you. I get up at (or before) 4am most days to get to the hospital on time. There is no way I'm going to workout in the morning. Nope. So my goal is often to workout after I get home at the end of the day. I often try to do it right when I get home before I can get comfy on my couch and end up skipping. 
10. Use it as "you" time. Seriously. I use workout time as time that I am NOT doing medicine. It's the time I watch trashy Netflix and no one can make me feel guilty about it. Seriously. I watch the stupidest television I can find while I workout and never have to feel guilty about it being a waste of time. 

I can't tell you the number of times I think about how I'd love to workout more, how I miss the days when I could workout 5-6 times a week for an hour. I miss those days. But the truth is, doing that while a resident (especially a surgical resident) is just not going to happen!! Sometimes sleep or studying or adulting need to take priority in your time off. 

So if there's any platitude included in this it's: do what you can and call it a win. :)