Men’s Health Magazine Television Tip
Oct 26th, 2009 by Carlos
The other day I was flipping through the complimentary Men’s Health Magazine that I got from running the Urbanathlon last weekend.
One of the sections included tips to battle bad habits. Habits like spending too much in front of the boob tube.
As someone who’s had his own personal struggles with TV watching, I was curious to hear what Men’s Health Magazine had to say about this.
I assumed it would say something like “Get off your fat ass and go run 10 miles instead of watching the Bears game for three hours while eating avocado-flavored potato chips.”
So I was surprised to see that Men’s Health wasn’t as draconian as I assumed it would be: their tip was to DVR/TiVo what you want to watch so you spend less time in front of the TV without missing your show.
And you skip those annoying commercials.
Makes sense, right? The reason I like the tip so much is because it’s realistic. Will most people stop watching their favorite TV shows to go out and run some miles? Nope. But this is a very easy, actionable tip: if you have TiVo or a DVR, this is a tip you can’t turn away from.
And on Sunday, I put it into practice. Instead of watching the Bears get destroyed by the Bengals in real time, I watched them get dismantled on my DVR.
- Average NFL game length: 3 hours 30 minutes
- Time I spent watching the whole game: 1 hour 41 minutes
That’s 1 hour and 20 minutes that I spent doing relatively productive stuff instead of watching commercials of switching to another channel.
Think about how many shows you watch and how much time you could “create” with this tip. For heavy TV watchers, this could mean an extra two or three hours a week to read a book, write a blog, or sit in the dark and scare your wife.
It’s your time, use it as you see fit.
Does anyone else have some good, realistic tips to make our TV watching more efficient and less of a waste of time?
How was the Urbanathalon? One of my goals is to run it in 2010.
It was awesome Kevin! I cut my time by about 4 minutes from the year before. You should definitely do it-it’s a blast.
Cool, I’m not really a runner though so I’m wondering if the training schedule they provide on the website is really accurate? I’ll probably do a 5k or two before attempting this just so I don’t embarrass myself
Kevin, I didn’t follow their training guide, although I’m sure it works wonders. It makes sense after running two of these. I separated the training into two parts: run up to 9-10 miles and then wear myself out for short bursts after running for a while. That worked OK for me but I’m sure their guide would’ve worked much better…but it’s a lot of work. I took a less scientific approach. My biggest tip: save some gas for the second half…I didn’t do that the fist time and suffered because of it.