Posted on August 14, 2018 by Kate Halsall

Let’s be honest, we’ve all been insanely busy at least once in our lives. Maybe you’ve been given some extra responsibility at work or perhaps your home life needs more of your time. Instead of letting all your hard-earned fitness go to waste, what you need is a simple way of how to maximise your results whilst training the minimum amount of time. Here are 3 tips to help you out.

Focus on the task at hand

Ditch the phone, minimise the conversation and get down to some hard graft. You’d be amazed how much ‘training time’ is taken up with everything other than training.

Stick with big, compound, multi-joint exercises

If you’ve only got a small amount of time, it would be a pretty poor decision to spend that time just sat on a treadmill or doing 15 different variations of a bicep curl. Instead go hard on exercises like squats, deadlifts, barbell rows, press ups, dips and pull ups. These exercises work multiple large muscle groups, meaning you’re burning more calories, building more muscle and getting better results for every minute spent in the gym.

Keep your rest times short

Waiting 5 minutes between sets is just silly, so try to keep your rest times less than two minutes. Not only will it keep your session shorter, but you’ll improve your cardio too. If you’re doing this right you should have a good sweat on throughout your session.

Here’s an example session when you put all this together:

  • Dynamic Warm Up before hand

A1) Squats (any variation) – 4 sets of 8. 2 minutes rest between sets

B1) Inverted Rows – 3 sets of 10

B2) Super set with Press Ups – 3 sets of 10. 90 seconds between super-sets

C1) Kettlebell Swings – 3 sets of 20

C2) Super set with Plank ‘Reaches’ – 3 sets of 20. 60 seconds between super-sets

  • Stretching afterwards

 

The whole session, including 5 minutes warm up and 5 minutes of stretching afterwards, can be completed in under 45 minutes, but still includes loads of high quality work.

So remember, if you’re ever really short of training time, stick to intensely focusing on multi-joint exercises with short rest times. You’ll be able to get fitter, stronger and achieve your goals without having to spend hours in the gym every week.