unless you’re lucky It’s enough to train for a living, but you may find it difficult to incorporate training into your daily life. Balancing work, family, other hobbies, and much-needed down time can leave you with little room for exercise, depending on what your priorities are. So if you want it all: great relationships, success at work, and some size and strength, how much time should you spend at the gym?
Unfortunately, there is no magical “one and a half hours” or other answer, say Dr. Mike Nelson, CSCS, Associate Professor at the Carrick Institute. He says that getting results in sweaty places like the gym, bike, or track is less about how much work you can accomplish over a set period of time and more about how much work you can accomplish.
Dr. Sean Arendt, CSCSThe chair of the exercise science department at the University of South Carolina agrees, saying, “We need to be less time-critical and think more about what we’re doing with that time.”
Regardless of the length of your session, the more quality work you can incorporate into your session, the better your fit will be. Learn how to use your limited time more wisely and get more done in less time.
How to actually measure your workouts
“Math problems are your set [multiplied by] Instead of spending minutes at the gym, “spend your time doing reps,” Arendt says. “That’s what dictates adaptation.”
He’s talking about training volume. That is, the total number of pounds you lift for every set and repetition of an exercise or body part. Mountains of research have shown that it increases both strength and size. Increasing the amount of training is the key to growthtime does not increase.
So the answer to how long you need to work out depends on how long you’ve been exercising to reach your current training volume, Arendt says. To get stronger and bigger, you need to do more workouts each week and month. This is a concept called “progressive overload.”
For example, let’s say you do dumbbell bench presses three times a week. In each workout session, he holds a 50-pound dumbbell in each hand and performs four sets of eight repetitions. Each session puts him through 1,600 pounds of work. It takes that much work, or more, to increase your strength and physique over time. You can increase the weight you lift, add reps or sets (there’s a reason for each choice). However, to increase that amount, you need to continue training long enough.
If you’re just looking to maintain what you’ve built so far, Arendt says you might want to reduce your workload slightly. That’s about 80% of the amount of work I’ve done so far. In this case, training time may be slightly shorter.
For beginners, Nelson says it takes very little time to get more volume. “If you’re untrained and just starting out, or haven’t trained in a while, you don’t need as much time,” he says. In fact, he says some beginners overdo it, training for too long and feeling depressed. They were in too much pain to train again for several days afterwards.
For these men, even a short 15-minute workout, like this 15-minute HIIT workout, can provide enough to make progress.
“But the more advanced you get, the more high-quality volumes you need to accumulate,” he says. And it will take even more time. “There’s no real way around it.”
How rest affects workout time
Another variable that can affect your time in the gym is your rest.
Arendt says resting between sets replenishes the adenosine triphosphate stored in the muscles you’re working. This compound, commonly known as ATP, is your muscles’ primary energy currency, which they use to contract. Resting will refill this gas tank so you can do the next set. When it comes to strength training, research review It has been shown that increasing strength and size is best done with a little more rest. If you rest 2-3 minutes between sets, you’ll see slightly more gains than if you rest 60 seconds between each set.
But that doesn’t mean you need to rest as much or double or triple your time in the gym to refuel for each set, Nelson says. Research requires things to be normalized so that they can be tested. For example, everyone needs to rest for 60 seconds, or 120 seconds.but you Since this is not a research study, break times may vary. He says it’s the quality of work you can do on the next set that determines your rest time between sets.
“Let’s say you’re doing a dumbbell bench press. If you use 90-pound dumbbells, you can do six reps,” he says. “Again he needs to take breaks long enough so that he can do closer to six reps. If he’s only getting three reps, he’s probably not getting enough rest. That means he’s not getting enough quality work. The amount of work and the amount of work that can be done is being sacrificed.”
Practically speaking, this can mean longer rest periods as your training progresses, he says. Between the first and second sets of the exercise, he’s still pretty fresh, so he doesn’t have to rest completely for 2-3 minutes to do 6 reps again. However, later sets in a workout may require more rest in order to do the quality volume needed to be effective. Adjusting your break times in this way can save you time.
Another way to save time when it comes to rest is to set aside big rest periods for big workouts, he says. You may need to take a few minutes to breathe in and out to recover after a series of heavy deadlifts or squats, but it’s easier to recover after isolation movements like triceps pushdowns. You probably don’t need the same amount of time to feel it.
How much time do I need to rest to gain strength?
“If you want to maximize your strength, longer rest periods are more effective. You’re probably using heavier weights, or you should be,” Arendt says. When lifting heavy sets of 1, 2, or 3 repetitions, you need to muster near-maximal levels of strength. These movements use a lot of muscle and a lot of ATP (also known as adenosine triphosphate, a molecule that your body uses for energy). As a result, your muscles need more time to replenish the ATP needed to perform large movements again. So even though your sets may be shorter, your workout will likely be a little longer, Arendt says.
Another reason this type of training takes longer to train, Nelson says, is because it requires more sets to warm up. When powerlifters are working on heavy sets of one or two reps, they don’t just slam all their weight onto the bar and tear it apart. They do a fair amount of warm-up sets. The longer the break, the more time it will take.
Rest time required for interval training
When it comes to improving fitness, training as short as 4 minutes has been proven to increase VO2 Max, a measure of cardiovascular training. Seven minutes of interval cardio (like this one) has been proven to be effective. In a 2013 survey, Participants experienced increased strength and endurance with a series of back-to-back movements lasting just 7 minutes per session. To get such a result, you need to increase your work over time. Even if you don’t increase your training time, Arendt says you need to increase your intensity.
Even with high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts like this one, “progressive overload is real,” he says. “You need to continue to challenge the system by adding more weight, more reps, a combination of both, or doing more work throughout the week.”
Balance time and intensity: If you shorten your workouts or use shorter intervals, you should do more intense workouts. Increasing or lengthening your intervals will increase your training time and prevent you from working as hard as you can.
4 tips for effective short strength training
Even when life is busy, people can be strong. Pack more volume into your resistance training time using his four strategies by Nelson and Arendt:
superset counter exercises
Alternating two exercises that use opposite muscles is a classic way to get more work done in less time. Performing a series of push exercises, such as dumbbell bench, followed by a series of pull exercises, such as dumbbell rows, can help strengthen your back while your chest recovers, and vice versa. This approach is known as superset.
That’s because the body’s use of ATP is localized, Arendt says. Muscles that contract to perform a movement consume ATP in that particular muscle. So, for example, when you use your chest or triceps on the bench, you don’t use up the ATP that would be used to contract your back or biceps. This type of superset involves alternating push and pull exercises. Examples include pull-ups and push-ups, bicep curls and triceps pushdowns, leg extensions and leg curls, and more.
According to Nelson, supersetting can result in a slight decrease in performance in both exercises compared to complete rest. However, setting up your workouts this way allows you to incorporate more quality volume into your session time while reducing the overall length of your workouts.
Trade isolation moves toward large-scale combined exercises
To save time, you need to prioritize. If you want to save time, focus on the most impactful movements – movements that use more muscles and joints at once and move more weight – to help you achieve your goal of building stronger muscles. says Arendt.
This means you need to do a lot of squats, deadlifts, rows, bench presses, pull-ups, push-ups, and other exercises that involve at least two joints.
Save accessory moves like bicep curls, skull crushers, and other single-joint moves for the end of your workout. If you have time, Arendt says, you can accommodate them.
Do sets with slightly fewer reps
Long sets take time, Arendt said. Most studies compare long sets with more reps to his five- to eight-rep sets. Even if a long set produces the same result, it will take longer.
Let’s do the math. If each rep of a set of 15 takes 4 seconds, the set will take him 1 minute. However, if you perform a set of 8 repetitions with a slightly heavier weight, the set will only take 40 seconds, even though the repetitions take 5 seconds.
You’ll save just 20 seconds. However, if your workout includes 30 sets, making this change will shave 10 minutes off your workout. Focusing on 5 to 10 repetitions per set will save you time and allow you to increase similar amounts, he says.
Do aerobic training when you’re not lifting
This may sound counterintuitive – aerobic aerobic training takes time and that’s what you’re trying to save on – but by building your aerobic base, you can save time on strength training. Nelson says this could reduce your workouts, Nelson says…because you won’t have to rest as long between sets to recover.
“If you look at someone with terrible aerobic capacity, you’re going to be limited in how much exercise they can do in the gym because they can’t recover,” he says. Improved aerobic fitness means faster recovery and more exercise.
Nelson’s suggestion: Try to move as much as possible for an hour each day, five days a week, whether it’s strength training or cardio. For example, if you work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, try doing 30 to 60 minutes of brisk walking or other aerobic exercise on Tuesday and Thursday. Over time, this may mean you can get more work done and get more results on your lifting days without spending more time in the gym.
Greg Presto is a fitness and sports reporter and videographer in Washington, DC.
