One of the most common reasons people avoid regular exercise is time constraints. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard I’m just too busy to spend countless hours in the gym.
The good news is that you don’t have to.
A big misconception about fitness is that you need to spend massive amounts of time sweating away on treadmills and lifting weights if you want to be in shape. I was not always immune to this idea. Sometimes my workouts would last over three hours per visit, and I thought that I was doing well.
Fortunately, I learned my lesson, and it has improved my own fitness, as well as enabled me to become a better personal trainer. My clients and group exercise participants will attest that 30-minutes is all it takes to devastate your muscles and torch your lungs.
Most of us spend more than 30 minutes staring into space every day, so there really is ample time to stay on top of your health.
Staring into space is a huge waste of time that could be spent exercising, but it isn’t alone. Many people waste copious amounts of time in the gym that could otherwise be spent exercising.
One of the biggest wastes of time in the gym is spent resting between sets. That alone can turn 30 minutes of exercise into three hours of gym time.
That doesn’t mean that I am suggesting rest should be taken entirely out of the equation.
Rest is very important to exercise, but that doesn’t mean you need to sit around idly while you give your burning muscles time to recover.
You can capitalize on the need to recover from an upper body exercise by super-setting it with a lower body exercise. While your upper body rests between sets, your lower body is working and vice versa.
That technique is known as peripheral heart action and keeps you working hard, even while you allow muscles to recover.
You can incorporate peripheral heart action into your workout by setting a timer for 10 minutes and then selecting two or three upper and lower body exercises. Once you start the clock, don’t stop exercising until the timer goes off.
When you perform 10 repetitions of one exercise, quickly transition to the next and keep going. Try to get through as many rounds as possible until the time has expired.
When that superset is complete, do another with a new set of exercises. Three supersets like this will allow you to get in a full body workout that will have your muscles screaming at you.
It will be hard. You will feel your heart pounding and your lungs will burn. But that is the whole point, isn’t it?
If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. If it doesn’t change you, what is the point?
Too many people work out until they are uncomfortable and then stop until the burning subsides and they can breathe easy again. That leads to long, worthless gym sessions.
It is what you do after the burn sets that matter most. Keep working, keep burning and pushing. You will shorten your workout and get so much more out of it.
Cardio is also an enormous source of wasted time. An hour of steady state exercise may leave you feeling exhausted, but the metabolic boost you receive will be minimal and goes away as soon as you step off the treadmill.
Ten to fifteen minutes of high-intensity interval training, HIIT, will torch your lungs and supercharge your metabolism in a manner that steady state cardio simply can’t do. Those short bursts of intense exercise will have you burning calories at a high rate for many hours, after you have left the gym.
When HIIT is combined with efficient peripheral heart action workouts, you can get incredible results from 30-minute excursions to the gym.
Needless to say, if you are looking for big results, don’t worry about spending more time in the gym. Just spend better time in the gym. Challenge yourself to push against your limits and then go about the rest of your day. Workout to enhance your life instead of enslaving your life to your workout.
