If you’re struggling to find enough time to exercise, you are not alone. Even if an effective workout can be long, short or anywhere in between, We often let the time required for commitment become a barrier, and think it’s not even worth starting. Fortunately, a new review paper from sports scientists has compiled a number of time-efficient strength training guidelines that will help you get the most work done in the shortest time.
To speed up your workout, skip the stretching and shorten the warm-up
When you first hit the gym, do you spend 20 minutes doing cardio, stretching, and moving your body through a series of warm-up exercises? If so, you can save a lot of time by leaving out anything that doesn’t have a specific reason to be part of your routine.
The ideal time-critical warm-up, write the authors of the review, is one that gets to the point: “[W]We recommend limiting the warm-up to exercise-specific warm-up exercises and only prioritizing stretches if the goal of the training is to increase flexibility. “
Exercise-specific warm-up means doing warm-up sets of the exercise you are about to do. For example, if you wanted to do squats, you would warm up by bending the empty bar and then bending some light weights before loading the bar for your first set of work.
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If that doesn’t sound enough to you, keep in mind that these are just guidelines and you can add anything that you enjoy or that will make your workout better. For more information on how to customize your warm-up program to suit your needs, see our guide to warming upwhere we explain the purpose of each part of the warm up. But just because you can include something in a warmup doesn’t mean you have to.
Choose multi-joint, bilateral exercises
The exercises that will work the most muscles in the shortest amount of time are bilateral (with both arms or legs at the same time) and involve flexing multiple joints, not just one. Ideally, they should also include a lifting and a lowering movement.
For example, a bicep curl with a dumbbell is unilateral (one arm) and one-jointed (you just ask your biceps to bend your elbow). The pull-up, on the other hand, uses both arms and uses your elbows and shoulders. If you’ve ever done pull-ups, you’ll remember that they work almost anything from the waist up. That makes them perfect for a time-consuming workout.
The authors write that if you can only choose three exercises, do these:
- An upper body pull (like pull-ups or rows)
- An upper body thrust (like bench press or overhead press)
- A leg exercise (like a squat)
Machines and dumbbells both work, they write, so you could do a leg press instead of a squat, or a chest press instead of a bench press. They prefer barbells over dumbbells when you can, as you can typically lift more weight on a barbell lift than its dumbbell equivalent. Resistance bands and body weight movements can also work, as long as they’re challenging enough to get the appropriate number of repetitions.
Lift heavy enough that you can do 6-15 reps
How many reps should you do in each set? This is a long controversial question to which the authors of this paper have two answers.
Ideally, you do sets that hard enough that the final reps feel like a challenge. These sets can be anywhere from 6 to 15 reps, and the last one doesn’t have to lead to total failure; You can stop when you feel like you can only squeeze a few more out.
The other option, if you don’t have heavy enough weights, is to do exercises to complete the failure – the point where you just can’t do another rep. In this case, the reps can range from 15 to 40.
To save even more time, you can simply rest less between sets. Typical rest times are three to five minutes, but if you’re new to lifting, a minute or two is probably okay, the authors write. (You may not be able to put as much weight on the bar as taking longer breaks, but your muscles are still getting a lot of work.) To tighten things up further, you can add a few time-honored bodybuilder hacks: Supersets, drop sets and rest-pause sets all give your muscles more work in less time.
How Often Should I Do Weight Training?
Two to three times a week is great if you’re doing a full body workout. However, the authors point out that the number of days you exercise does not matter. So if you can only do one session a week and spend a little more time doing it, you can effectively fit in a full week of strength training in one day.
On the flip side, if you can only do 15 minutes a day and do it every day, you may still get as much work as someone doing two or three regular sessions a week.
What counts as a training week? The authors recommend four to twelve sets per muscle group per week. Four is on the low end compared to what many gym goers do, but we’re trying to find the minimum that will keep you in shape. So if you can only do four, it’ll be four. They find that research has shown that people who are new to weight training can build muscle with very little exercise (three sets per week, in some studies), so even a small amount of weight training is worth your time.
Back to our three-exercise framework, if you can do four sets of pushes, four sets of pulls, and four sets of legs, this is your weekly minimum right here. Do this in one day, if that’s all you can manage, or spread it out over the week. More is better, but that is your minimum goal.
