I'm genuinely bewildered. What is this for?
Exercising takes a really long time. If I wanted to be physically active, I need to allocate a big chunk of my day towards exercising, which means I need to give up something else --- something I actually enjoy.
One thing that physically active people tend not to realise is that not everybody finds exercise enjoyable.
I am not particularly unfit; I do various physically active things; but for me, regular exercise is horrible. I find it an utterly miserable experience; uncomfortable in every possible way, and worst of all, incredibly boring. And it never gets better. A while ago I made myself train up and enter a 10km race, and completed in a reasonable time. As I progressed, the only thing that changed was that I was capable of prolonging the discomfort for longer. That's a negative feedback loop! I was so glad when I actually completed the race and could finally stop.
I am so, so jealous of people who actually enjoy doing this crap.
So if there's a side-effect free way of getting the health benefits of exercise without having to put up with an hour a day of tedium and lactic acid reaction, that would be amazing.
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Is it possible you're doing it wrong, or maybe we have different understanding of what "really long time" is?
I exercise 4 times per week, and my workout lasts 40-60 minutes including shower and clothes change. This includes pre-workout stretching, strength training and some static / balance exercises.
I try to use my time as effective as possible, so I'm almost never idle. I superset my exercises, i.e. do a rowing exercise, immediately followed by a pressing exercise. But some rest is still required, so I do a stretch or a balance exercise, i.e. working on handstands while resting.
This lets me include 6-8 exercises for 2-4 sets each in about 30-40 minutes.
Now you may say 4 hours per week is still too much. If I was seriously pressed on time, I would reorganise my training to only exercise each body part at most 1 time per week, thus combining 4 workouts into 3 shorter or even 2 longer ones, bringing the time down to 2.5-3 hours per week. I may stop exercising smallest muscles, such as biceps, directly.
Anyway, following my schedule I consider myself in a very good shape for 41, I'm 178cm/74kg, around 10-12% bodyfat if not less, can bench about 1.3 times my bodyweight, squat over 1.5 and deadlift over 2 times bodyweight.
Or maybe a sport might be more fun? Tennis, ulimate frisbee etc.
The point I'm making is that exercise is not fun for me, and while I appreciate the effort, attempts to persuade me otherwise are doomed to failure. (The endless, banal music the gym played didn't help.) What was worse was that there was no objective way to measure progress so I didn't even know if it was doing anything.
(That said, I do enjoy hill walking (== hiking), but that's even more of a time sink and not something I can do on a daily basis. It's also strictly low-output aerobic.)
I agree that not being able to measure progress is horribly demotivating. But I find the opposite, that exercise is one of the few areas in my life where I can objectively measure progress. For example:
Body weight
Resting heart rate
5k run time
Longest distance run without stopping
Max weight / number of repetitions / duration for strength exercises
Being told that I need six months' work before anything measurable happens is not really something I find motivating!
For me when I started exercising seriously I started noticing I was consistently beating my personal bests [1] after about 2 weeks. It doesn't take 6 months. I even started feeling great from the cardio on Day 1.
[1] Running times over a set distance, and amount of pushups/pullups/situps in a row. If I actually recovered properly it would probably take even less time to beat the initial records.