If there is one thing everyone wishes they had more of it is time.
I have yet to have a client that didn’t struggle with trying to make time for what we aknow we should do to take care of ourselves.
Many of the people I work with are normal average people, they have a couple of kids, work a full time job, have a very active social life, and don’t want to make their health and wellness a full time job. Lots of people struggle with just setting aside an hour a day to dedicate to their health and wellness.
I am no different, 2 kids, a wife, one full time job and another part time job, plenty of social engagements…it is not easy to find time to do it all.
What I try to do with clients and myself is use the most time efficient tools, techniques, and practices that give us the most return on the time put in. That is why I put so much focus on the major pillars of health, sleep, stress management, diet, exercise, and movement: nothing is going to improve your health more than making improvements in these areas of your life.
For things like sleep it is hard to escape the fact that you just need to put in your 7-8 hours daily. You can’t find a shortcut that allows you to shorten that, there is no time efficient strategy.
However for the other pillars we can always look for approaches that optimize the time you are putting in while potentially not sacrificing your results.
This is especially true for exercise.
There is no greater example of being time efficient with your exercise than doing high-intensity interval training, commonly referred to as HIIT. There are a lot of benefits to HIIT but one of the primary benefits is that you can get an effective workout in a fraction of the time. This comes with a tradeoff, the workout is short but it also needs to be VERY HARD. For some people though the tradeoff is worth it because they don’t have to spend a ton of time working out (and enjoy suffering 😉).
HIIT is great for cardiovascular health but generally is not the most effective form of exercise if you are looking to improve your muscle health and strength. Strength training is heads and tails above anything else when it comes to improving your muscle health and strength.
You might be wondering “Why can’t we just do HIIT but with weights?”
In fact there are no shortage of workouts that try this approach.
While HIIT with weights can feel like a great workout and can be fun to do, these workouts are not doing much in terms of adding muscle and strength. In other words you are putting in a lot of hard work but not getting the best returns on your effort.
Why?
Well running through a bunch of resistance training exercises very fast and with little rest basically requires you to lighten the weight you are using and the workout ends up pushing your cardiovascular system rather than challenging your muscles. Essentially most of these workouts basically end up turning into cardio but instead of running or biking, you are using weights.
The question then becomes are there time efficient strategies you can use when doing resistance training workouts that still focus on challenging your muscles rather than your cardiovascular system?
Luckily a group of researchers took a look at all the research on time efficient resistance training strategies and summarized the approaches that they found to be most effective (Resistance Exercise Minimal Dose Strategies for Increasing Muscle Strength in the General Population: An Overview, 2024).
Let’s take a look at some of the strategies they found to be most effective.
The Weekend Warrior
The first strategy is the weekend warrior strategy to resistance training. The name of this approach comes from the fact that people generally have more free time on the weekends so they can dedicate a chunk of that to exercise. While the name of this strategy may imply you only workout on the weekend, in reality you can workout any time during the week but you would only workout for 1-2 days a week.
The researchers found that this approach can be as effective as doing multiple exercise sessions throughout the week with one big caveat: you need to do the same amount of exercise across the 1-2 days you workout as you would normally do when exercising throughout the week.
What this means is that you can’t expect that if you are doing 3 one hour resistance training sessions a week and you suddenly dropped that down to 1 one hour resistance training session on the weekend that you would get the same results. Instead the one session you do on the weekend would need to be 3 hours long.
This is the downside of this approach, ultimately very few people I have encountered have the stamina to be doing a 3 hour long resistance training session. If however you split those 3 hours over 2 days of 1.5 hours, that seems much more doable.
In my opinion this approach is feasible, but probably not realistic for the average person to cram into a single day. It is more realistic that they split the total time over 2 days, but even then it could be too much exercise for some people, especially if they are new to resistance training.
Single Set Resistance Exercise
Next is an approach called single set resistance exercise. Most strength training programs will have you do at least 2 sets and progressively add more and more sets over time. You will even hear of more advanced programs and individuals doing 7,8,9,10, or more sets of a given exercise. Obviously the more sets you add to a program the more time it takes.
With Single-set resistance exercise you only do one set of each exercise. The magic in single-set resistance exercise is that you need to take that single set close to, or to absolute failure. You need to ensure you provide the necessary stimulus to your muscles for it to grow in that one single set.
In reality though, I don’t think this is realistic for most people. The top reason why is that this can be unsafe especially for full body compound movements like the squat, deadlift, bench press etc. If and when you fail you need to know to “bail” out of these exercises without injuring yourself and/or others. Frankly, most people don’t know how to do that properly and that puts them at a greater risk of injuring themselves or others.
Second is the fact that as you get close to failure your form tends to degrade and therefore increases your risk of injuring yourself.
Finally most people think they are close to “failure” but in reality still could do a few more reps. Knowing how close to failure you are comes with time and experience but most people just haven’t put in enough time training close to failure to have a good sense of what failure really is.
That said, I don’t think that the single set resistance exercise approach is completely worthless, rather I would prefer to use it for select exercises that tend to be safer when going to failure. For example body weight exercises would lend itself to this type of protocol. Most people can safely go to failure in a single set doing something like push ups or pull ups. Also machine based exercises can tend to work really well for single set resistance exercises because once you get to failure you can safely stop the exercise without trying to ditch a barbell and your form is less likely to be sacrificed since the machine is typically supporting you.
Exercise Snacks
The next approach is something called exercise snacks. This approach is pretty much the opposite of the weekend warrior approach. With this approach the duration of the exercise session is very low but the number of days you exercise will be high. For example in one of the studies the researchers reviewed participants did two exercise sessions a day for a total of 9 minutes per day every day of the week. This approach is ideal for those who can find a short period of time throughout the day to do some exercise nearly everyday during the week.
This approach works well for people who are working from home and have a home gym or for body weight exercises, band workouts, or something like a suspension trainer. If you are relying on a commercial gym to do your strength training, the time to commute multiple times a day makes it unrealistic. However if you have a home gym you can pop down to and do an exercise that would seem feasible.
If you don’t have a home gym you can still use the exercise snack approach but just do body weight exercises, or use bands, or use something like a suspension trainer.
One limitation of exercise snacks is if you are doing a compound movement with a heavy weight. Very few people can walk up to a barbell for a 400 lb deadlift cold with no warm ups. Most people’s warmup for that type of lift would take longer than 9 minutes in which case it starts to become more than just a “snack”.
The Strength Test
Next up we have an approach called practicing the strength test. In this approach you would do 1 one rep max of each exercise, meaning you would do 1 rep with the most weight you can lift for each exercise.
This is similar to the single set exercise protocol but this approach involves doing a single rep at a weight you can only do 1 rep of. Therefore the same caveats I mentioned in the single-set exercise protocol apply to this approach as well, however this approach is slightly riskier because the weights you will be using will be very heavy and therefore my concern for potentially injury goes up significantly. I honestly have never asked a client to do a 1 rep max like this because it is too risky and knowing your 1 rep max really has no significance to most people’s goals. Therefore I really don’t think this is a viable approach.
Low Dose Eccentric Only Exercises
The final approach is doing low dose eccentric only exercises. Most exercises consist of what is called an eccentric and concentric phase. The eccentric phase is when the muscle is lengthened and the concentric phase is when the muscle is shortened. If we take a chin up for example the concentric phase is when you pull your chin up to the bar because the bicep is getting shorter, the eccentric phase is when you lower yourself back down from the top of the bar.
So an eccentric only chin up would involve you using a box or something else so that you can start at the top of the chin up, then step off the box and slowly lower yourself down. Then dropping down from the bar and getting back on the box for the start of your next rep.
Why focus on the eccentric phase rather than the concentric phase? The eccentric phase of an exercise is the phase that causes the most damage to the muscle. While that might sound like a bad thing, this is what causes your muscles to adapt and grow bigger and stronger. In other words we are being more efficient by just focusing on the portion of the rep which causes the adaptation we want.
Eccentric only training protocols will typically do a single set to failure, so they are essentially a specific type of the single set exercise protocol. In addition to all the caveats with the single set exercise protocol the additional challenge with the eccentric only exercises is that there are not a lot of eccentric only exercises you can do easily. That said here are some exercises that are easy to do the eccentric only portion of the rep:
Push Ups
When we start to get into something like an eccentric only squat you have to get creative as this video demonstrates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_3Ejs6eldI
Most people are not going to go through this type of effort unless they have a really good reason, hence why eccentric only exercise training is not that popular.
Given these strategies, what are my suggestions regarding time efficient resistance training workouts?
I think it is best to use a combination of some of the strategies above. For example, you can use a combination of exercise snacks, single set training, and eccentric only training in addition to some more traditional weekend warrior type sessions.
Let me explain…
Since most of the full body compound lifts don’t lend themselves easily or safely to many of the strategies we have talked about I would perform those in a more traditional fashion on your weekend (or whatever days of the week you have the most free time). So keep your squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, and any other lifts you may be prioritizing on the weekend doing multiple sets and getting close to but not going to absolute failure. These sessions would not be terribly long because you might only be doing 2-3 exercises 2 days a week.
Then for some of the accessory exercises you can do those in your exercise snacks, and you can combine that with going to failure in one set and/or doing eccentrics only since they easily lend themselves to that style of training. Say some of your accessory exercises are push ups, pull ups, lunges, band tricep extensions, and band face pulls.
You can do these as exercise snacks throughout the week, taking 2-3 minutes for 4 times a day to do each exercise on the other 5 days of the week. You can do a single set to failure approach for some, eccentric only for some and vary what approach you take over the 5 days.
While I think some of these approaches are interesting, it’s honestly not what I do with clients who are time challenged.
The key when it comes to exercise programming is to keep it simple, because the simple things are easy to do consistently and consistency will have the greatest impact on your health. When my clients are crunched for time, I tell them to do what they can in the workout as programmed and if you don’t make it all the way through no big deal, you still did something. Even if you only do one set of one exercise, that’s still better than skipping the whole thing completely. Telling them to do a completely different program of eccentric only exercises or one set to failure on days where they don’t have enough time just introduces too much complexity for more people.
If they are consistently crunched for time and I know this ahead of time I will design their program with this in mind. I tend to go for more of a workout snack approach to deal with this problem. Their workouts will only be 15-20 minutes but they then have to workout 6 days a week. 15-20 minutes is a bit more than a workout snack, but that is manageable for most people. I have yet to have someone say they couldn’t find 15 minutes in their day most days of the week in order to work out.
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References
Resistance Exercise Minimal Dose Strategies for Increasing Muscle Strength in the General Population: an Overview. (2024, March 20). PubMed. Retrieved May 6, 2024, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38509414/
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