Optimal Workout Duration

If you're not fortunate enough to exercise as part of your job, fitting a workout into your busy schedule can be tough.

Balancing work, family, hobbies, and downtime often leaves little room for fitness, depending on your priorities.

But if you want it all—strong relationships, career success, and increased strength—how much gym time do you need?

Unfortunately, there's no straightforward answer like "an hour and a half," says Mike Nelson, an associate professor at the Carrick Institute.

The effectiveness of your workouts isn't about the time spent but rather the work accomplished, he explains.

Shawn Arent, chair of the Department of Exercise Science at the University of South Carolina, concurs, emphasizing focusing less on time and more on the quality of your activities.

The more efficient work you can pack into a session—regardless of its duration—the fitter you'll become. Here’s how you can maximize your gains in limited time.

Measuring Your Workouts Effectively

According to Arent, the key isn't minutes spent in the gym but the "maths problem" of sets multiplied by reps.

This determines your training volume, the total amount of weight lifted across exercises. Research shows that increasing workout volume is essential for strength and size gains, not just extending time.

The answer to your workout length depends on how long you've been exercising to reach your current lifting volume.

To grow stronger and bigger, you must increase workout volume progressively over weeks and months.

For example, if you bench press three times weekly, lifting four sets of eight reps with 50-pound dumbbells per hand equals 1,600 pounds per session.

To boost strength and size, maintain or increase that workload by lifting more weight, adding reps or sets, or extending workout time.

If maintaining your current physique is the goal, you might reduce the workload to 80% of your current volume, resulting in shorter workouts.

Beginners might achieve increased volume quickly. Nelson notes that untrained individuals or those returning to exercise don't require much time to progress.

Long sessions can lead to soreness, hindering frequent training. For them, even brief workouts, like 15-minute HIIT routines, can be effective.

Advanced trainers need to accumulate more high-quality volume, which often requires more time.

How Rest Influences Workout Duration

Rest is another factor affecting gym time. Between sets, muscles replenish adenosine triphosphate (ATP), their primary energy source.

Longer rest periods, around two to three minutes, are shown to benefit strength and size gains more than shorter rests.

However, Nelson suggests varying rest periods based on performance quality in subsequent sets. For instance, after dumbbell bench presses, rest until you can almost replicate your previous reps. If not, you might need more rest.

Practically, initial sets may require shorter rests due to freshness, while later sets demand longer breaks for quality volume. Adjusting rest this way saves time.

Longer rests are more critical for significant exercises, like deadlifts or squats, than isolation moves, like triceps pushdowns.

Optimal Rest for Strength

Maximizing strength necessitates longer rests, especially with heavier weights. Heavy lifting demands near-maximal strength, consuming significant ATP.

More time is needed to replenish ATP for subsequent sets, extending workouts despite shorter set durations.

Additionally, heavy training, like powerlifting, requires more warm-up sets, paired with longer rests, further extending workout durations.

Rest for Interval Workouts

Short workouts, as brief as four minutes, can still enhance fitness by improving VO2 Max. Seven-minute interval cardio workouts have shown strength and endurance gains.

Even short sessions necessitate increasing intensity over time to maintain progress.

Progressive overload applies to high-intensity interval training (HIIT) too. Continuously challenge the system with more weight, reps, or work throughout the week.

Balance time and intensity—shorter workouts or intervals should be more intense, while longer intervals warrant less intensity.

4 Tips for Shorter, Effective Strength Workouts

When life gets hectic, you can still build strength with these strategies:

1. Superset Opposing Exercises: Alternate exercises targeting opposing muscles, like bench presses and rows, to work different muscles while others recover. This method, known as supersets, allows more work in less time, though performance may slightly decrease compared to full rests.
   
   
2. Prioritize Compound Exercises: Focus on impactful moves involving multiple joints and muscles, like squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses. Leave single-joint exercises for the end if time permits.
   
   
3. Perform Fewer Reps: Longer sets take more time. Opt for shorter sets with slightly heavier weights, reducing total workout time while maintaining results.

Reducing each set by just 20 seconds may not seem significant, but over the course of a workout with 30 sets, you could save 10 minutes.

By concentrating on performing five to ten repetitions per set, you can decrease workout time while still achieving comparable volume, according to experts.

Incorporate Aerobic Training on Non-Lifting Days

While it might seem contradictory—given that aerobic cardio takes up time you’re trying to save—aerobic training can actually lead to shorter strength workouts.

Building up your aerobic base, as Nelson suggests, allows for shorter rest periods between sets, reducing overall workout duration.

Nelson explains that individuals with poor aerobic capacity are limited in their gym volume because their recovery time is longer.

Improved aerobic fitness leads to quicker recovery and, consequently, the ability to handle more volume.

Nelson recommends aiming for an hour of movement each day, five days a week. This could include both lifting and cardio.

For instance, if you lift weights on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, engage in brisk walking or other cardio activities for 30 to 60 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday.

Over time, this approach could enable more intensive workouts on lifting days without increasing gym time.

Source: menshealth

The opinions shared in the GymNation blog articles are solely those of the respective authors and may not represent the perspectives of GymNation or any member of the GymNation team.