Whether you're working a full time job, a parent with a couple of kids, or a student juggling a crazy class schedule, almost everyone is really busy these days.   And if you're also trying to squeeze regular training into that busy schedule, well, things can end up in the ludicrous zone pretty quickly... I'm no exception: of course I'm running Grapplearts, training in BJJ and trying not to fall too far behind on my conditioning, but I'm also a full time firefighter, have a couple of kids, and - until recently anyway - was responsible for homeschooling those two kids half time. Anyway, life wearing all those different hats is exciting at best and exhausting at worst!   Along the way I've picked up some tips for continuing to train and improve in the martial arts when time is super limited that I'd like to share with you... Everyone is Busy! Everyone is busy and we all wish we had more time but time is limited. Every day is 24 hours so we get 168 hours a week. That's it. If we consider the eight or so hours we spend sleeping each night, that leaves just over a hundred hours a week and, if we're at work full time, we lose another half of that, give or take. That leaves us with 50 or 60 hours a week for whatever else. Many people squander much of that time watching TV shows like "Dancing With the Stars", "Westworld" or "Game of Thrones" and, while that last one is well worth-watching, it's still safe to say we would all be better off throwing away our TVs and canceling our Netflix subscriptions. That's one way to waste less time but what are the others? One thing people do to free up more time each day is to cut back on sleep. We all do it but research shows that, for high-level athletic competition, you need at least 10 hours of sleep each night. I tried doing this in 2005 and 2006.  I had been invited to compete in the Abu Dhabi Trials but was finding it hard to train in regular classes because there were two young children in the house that I had to help take care of. My solution was to start getting up at 5 am and train early in the morning with other people in similar time-stressed situations. This worked fine for a couple of weeks until I sustained a horrific pinched nerve in my neck for the next 6 months there was continuous ice-pick-in-my-shoulder-blade pain that resisted all attempts at rehabilitation. The bottom line is that the real cause was over-training and under-resting.  I simply couldn't sustain training hard while only sleeping 5 to 6 hours a night. For most people (other than some freaks among us who can subsist on almost no sleep) once  you start cutting down on your sleep, you start cutting into your ability to recover. And nothing is more horrendous than being over-trained and under-rested because, if you don't sleep enough to recover from your training, you'll eventually get sick or badly injured. The only other option, of course, is to keep yourself going on a steady stream of stimulants but, while that might work for a while, you'll eventually burn out and crash even worse. This is why doctors don't recommend drinking twelve cups of coffee a day. As BJJ black belt Marcio Feitosa once told me, "The first part of training is the sleeping. If you don’t sleep you can’t do anything, unless you are using chemicals and steroids.”" So what do you do when you're busy and you have to sleep? There are three general categories. Waste Less Time & Make More Time The first thing you can do is to make time. Tossing out your television and/or cancelling your Netflix subscription are two fine ways to do this. Another thing you can do to make more time is to train outside of regular class times. Get a friend to join you when no one else is on the mats at your club, or at another club, or on mats you've set up at home. Even if it's just 45-minutes a few times a week... It isn't much but it's enough to do a little bit of drilling and a few minutes of rolling. It's better than nothing and doing something is always better than d