However, the concept of exercising twice a day has some merit — especially if you approach it right. Sometimes people assume they need to exercise for a long time or it’s not worth it. Or they think they only have time for one kind of exercise in life — but then that gets boring.

Two-a-days can switch things up.

So, for instance, maybe you go for a 25-minute run in the morning and then do a 15-minute strength training session at night after your kids go to bed. That’s 40 minutes of activity, but you didn’t need a 40-minute chunk of time to do it.

Or maybe you can do a 15-minute yoga video over your lunch break, and then you swim laps for 20 minutes during your kid’s 30-minute swim lesson at night. The lesson isn’t long enough to cover a long workout, but it can cover something, and you can do something different at a different point to get yourself up over 30 minutes a day.

Any exercise is better than no exercise. That said, I know some people find it hard to believe that 20 minutes will do much. And yes, if you’re training for a marathon, you’ll need to find longer stretches. But my experience is that people have a lot more 20-minute chunks during the day than they have hour-long chunks. If you think exercise requires an hour, there may be a lot of days when you don’t exercise.

If you start trying to use bits of time though, you might exercise more days. And by trying different things, you keep from getting bored. Running 40 minutes on a treadmill can feel tedious. Twenty might feel like it’s not that long — and then you do something else for another 20 minutes. Or maybe you even run for 20 minutes on that treadmill in the morning, go about your day, and run for another 20 minutes at night. Neither felt so long but it still totaled 40.

In any case, I’ve been doing this some days this summer. I will sometimes run in the mornings, but I really don’t want to get up that early. So I run for about 30 minutes and then often do something later: a bike ride, kicking back and forth in the pool, a strength training session. Occasionally I even run, bike, and swim in one day! It’s not a real triathlon by any means but there are a lot of days when it all fits.

In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Lisa Doggett, a physician, discusses her experience of living with multiple sclerosis. She was diagnosed when her youngest child was 2. She and Sarah discuss what it is like to navigate the health care system and to live life as a parent with a health challenge. Doggett writes more about this topic in her new memoir, Up the Down Escalator.

In the Q&A section, a listener writes in wondering whether she should leave her current role, which provides “balance,” but has not felt challenging or interesting enough. This is a dilemma that I know a number of people face, so let us know your thoughts (and your thoughts on her related question of whether it is OK to leave a job right after a maternity leave).

Please give the episode a listen, and as always, we welcome ratings and reviews!