There are 168 hours in a week. You train for 3. Any results yet?

In a week there are 168 hours. You can account for approximately 56 hours of those 168 to be sleeping, unless you are like me and have small children.  This brings us down to 112 hours per week of time to be awake.  If you spend approximately 40 hours at work this brings us down to 72 other hours.  These 72 hours make up the time during the week dedicated to things that aren't sleeping or working (for those of you who do).

If you think about most people, and this can include yourself, likely 3 hours of any given week are spent dedicated to exercise.  Therefore if you expect results, you need to consider the percentage of a week dedicated to it.  Approximately 1.7% of a week, if you exercise, is dedicated to it.

You're probably surprised with the math listed above, but when you realize that you aren't going to get results that way, it all actually makes sense.  To add even more math to this, consider your meals.  Assuming you spend 30 minutes per meal, at 3 meals per day, you're eating for approximately 90 minutes per day.  This breaks down to approximately 10.5 hours per week of food consumption.  So now we're at 61.5 hours remaining, assuming we don't include the exercise to that number....yet.

Now consider meal preparation.  For breakfast and lunch, you may be at 30 minutes combined, depending on what you decide to do.  But for my examples, we'll go with it.  Dinner is usually substantially longer, and therefore we'll give it another 30 minutes by itself.  So now we have another 7 hours per week and this brings us down to 54.5 hours.

Next, we consider the average daily commute, which according to the US Census Bureau is 25 minutes.  This gives us another 50 minutes per day, but for only 5 days per week, so a little more than 6 hours per week.  Bringing us down to 48.5 (ish) hours.

We can get really particular and consider restroom times and whatnot, but I'd rather not get weird.  But assume we have several hours per week dedicated to that and we'll get down to 45 hours per week left.  In any case, we are seriously dwindling down our original time from the 168 to the now 45 ish hours.  From this point it's entirely individual.

You see my point do you?  We don't spend a lot of time dedicated to exercise, which would bring us down to 42 hours if you consider the average person's 3 hours per week.  The rest could be divided up between cleaning house, watching TV, and other recreational activities.  Unless you're fortunate enough to have a job that requires a high level of physical activity, it's unlikely you'll ever perform a truly adequate amount of exercise.