Maximize Your Time: Effective Strategies for Shortening your workouts
In our busy lives we often find it hard to find the time to work out. Looking at old training videos of Arnold Schwarzenegger can lead you to believe that you need to be practically living in the gym to build any muscle. However, this is not the case and just spending a couple of hours per week exercising can lead to significant improvements in strength, muscle size and your health. Here are some evidenced-based strategies that you can implement to shorten your workouts while still having them be effective.
#1 Supersets
Using supersets (particularly antagonist paired supersets) can reduce the time spent at the gym by up to 36% (Burke et al., 2024). Antagonist paired supersets are when you perform a set of an exercise (e.g. Bench press) and then with minimal rest you perform another exercise that uses a different muscle group (e.g. Seated Rows). After that you take a rest break before repeating. When it comes to increasing muscular size, studies have found that supersets and traditional sets produce similar results when it comes to muscular hypertrophy (Iversen et al., 2024).
#2 Rest times
While resting is important, excessive downtime between sets can really drag out a training session. Generally, when it comes to training for strength longer rest times (2-5 minutes) are prescribed (Willardson, 2008). However, resting less than 60 seconds in between each set can still lead to significant gains in muscular strength and in people who are new to training 1-2 minutes can actually maximize strength gains (Grgic et al., 2018)
#3 Compound movements
Compound movements are movements that use multiple muscle groups at the same time. This means that you can work more muscles as the same time and less exercises need to be performed. For example, a chest press works the chest, triceps and a bit of the shoulders. If you were using exclusively isolation exercises you could use a chest fly, triceps pushdown, and a dumbbell front raise to hit these same muscle groups. Of course, I’m not saying a bench press is just as good for the triceps as the triceps pushdown but if you were short on time, you could reduce the volume of the triceps isolation exercises you were doing.
#4 Reduce the amount of sets you’re doing per workout
Many people believe that when it comes to resistance training more is better, however that is not always the case. 10-20 sets a week per muscle group is a general recommendation for optimizing muscle growth (Baz-Valle et al., 2022), but meaningful gains in both muscle size and strength can be achieved using far fewer sets. One study found that just 1 heavy set done 2-3 times per week can lead to strength increases in most people (Androulakis-Korakakis et al., 2020) and for muscle hypertrophy you can see meaningful gains by performing just 4 sets a week per muscle group (Schoenfeld et al., 2017). If you’re just exercising for health, you can train even less. Just 60 minutes per week can greatly reduce your risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (Momma et al., 2022).
In summary, many people choose not to exercise as they think there is a large time commitment. However, by using these evidence-based strategies you can still effectively train while not spending hours in the gym.
References:
Androulakis-Korakakis, P., Fisher, J. P., & Steele, J. (2020). The minimum effective training dose required to increase 1RM strength in resistance-trained men: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 50(4), 751-765.
Baz-Valle, E., Balsalobre-Fernández, C., Alix-Fages, C., & Santos-Concejero, J. (2022). A systematic review of the effects of different resistance training volumes on muscle hypertrophy. Journal of Human Kinetics, 81(1), 199-210.
Burke, R., Hermann, T., Pinero, A., Mohan, A.E., Augustin, F., Sapuppo, M., Coleman, M., Androulakis Korakakis, P., Wolf, M., Swinton, P.A., Schoenfeld, B.J.(2024). Less time, same gains: Comparison of superset vs traditional set training on muscular adaptations
Grgic, J., Schoenfeld, B. J., Skrepnik, M., Davies, T. B., & Mikulic, P. (2018). Effects of rest interval duration in resistance training on measures of muscular strength: a systematic review. Sports Medicine, 48, 137-151.
Iversen, V. M., Eide, V. B., Unhjem, B. J., & Fimland, M. S. (2024). Efficacy of Supersets Versus Traditional Sets in Whole-Body Multiple-Joint Resistance Training: A Randomized Controlled Trial. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 38(8), 1372-1378.
Momma, H., Kawakami, R., Honda, T., & Sawada, S. S. (2022). Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. British journal of sports medicine, 56(13), 755-763.
Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of sports sciences, 35(11), 1073-1082.
Willardson, J. M. (2008). A brief review: how much rest between sets?. Strength & Conditioning Journal, 30(3), 44-50.
