No Time To Exercise? Try This Method For Building Strength In Just A Few Minutes At A Time.

Can you guess the most common reason people don’t stick to their workout programs? I bet you can. They have no time to exercise.

I understand. Exercise can be time consuming, and you probably already have a lot of demands on your time. What if you could get stronger and build muscle in just a few short minutes a day?

I know it sounds too good to be true, like I’m one of those ridiculous infomercials telling you that you can get the body of your dreams without ever leaving the couch.

It’s not quite that simple. Anything worth achieving takes effort, and the strategy I’m about to share with you is no different. It’s not easy (exercise and leading a healthy lifestyle never is) and it’s not a quick fix. But it is a science-backed method for building strength with very short bouts of exercise.

It’s called “Greasing The Groove”, and it was popularized by Pavel Tsatsouline, founder of StrongFirst and the man credited with bringing kettlebell training to the western world.

I’ve written about this method before, with an in-depth explanation. Check out my full article on How Strength Works for all those details.

Here’s a brief summary so you can understand the basic idea.

How You Really Get Stronger

You might be surprised to learn that you get better at lifting weights not just because your muscles get bigger and stronger, but because your brain and nervous system get better at creating just the right pattern of muscle activation to move the weights.

That pattern is known as the neural pathway, and there’s an optimal one for each movement you do.

Every time you do anything physical, your brain is figuring out the right combination of force and timing so you can successfully complete the movement. This muscle firing at this percentage of its full strength at this time, that muscle firing at that percentage a split second later, another muscle stabilizing the main muscles…

Let’s say you go to open a heavy door that you’ve never opened before. You grab the handle and pull, but you don’t exert enough force and the door doesn’t budge. Or you overshoot and pull too hard without bracing your legs, and you stumble backwards. After you shake off the embarrassment and try again, your brain figures out exactly the right way to successfully open that door.

Door opening is pretty simple, of course. Once your brain figures out the right neural pattern for a certain door, you’ll pretty much always be able to open that door successfully.

But now let’s think about a more skillful movement, like throwing. Imagine a baseball pitcher. To strike out their opponent, a good pitcher needs to throw both powerfully and accurately, and each pitch is slightly different.

It takes a lot of time and practice to build just the right neural pathway for really good throw, and the better the neural pathway, the better the throw.

Like throwing, lifting weights is a skill. And like any other skill, the more you practice the better you get at it. The key is high quality practice. This is where many people go wrong with their workouts.

Building Strength Without Muscle Failure

Many people (and even many trainers and coaches) think that you need to totally fatigue your muscles and exhaust yourself in each workout to stimulate muscle growth. That’s called “going to muscular failure”.

Muscular failure is when you fatigue your muscles until they cannot continue to create force. In a push up, for example, it’s when you try as hard as you possibly can to push yourself off the ground, but your body just won’t move.

Advanced and highly skilled weightlifters can usually maintain good form when their muscles get close to failure, but most people can’t.

When your muscles get tired, your form will probably break down. You might lean or swing, you might start using other muscles to compensate and complete the movement. I see this all the time.

Now you’re using a different neural pathway, and usually not an efficient one. Your movements will actually get worse this way, because instead of building good neural pathways you’re practicing bad ones.

This is exactly why you want to stay away from training to failure when you’re a beginner and when you’re trying to build strength.

Instead, you should be practicing perfect movement more often.

Let’s go back to that baseball pitcher. To get better, he doesn’t go out and spend an hour throwing fastballs until his arm is exhausted. If he did, he would lose his speed and accuracy and maybe even get injured.

Instead, he throws a few perfect pitches at a time, trying to get the movement pattern just right. Once he feels like fatigue is setting in and he’s starting to slow down, he stops and picks it up again another time. That’s high quality practice.

How Does High Quality Practice Save You Time?

For a full strength workout, you might spend an hour at the gym. You might also drive 10 minutes each way, plus take 20 minutes to shower and change afterwards. Of course it’s challenging to carve out this much time during an already busy day.

Instead, you can use the “greasing the groove” method. This involves doing just one or two repetitions of a specific exercise at a time, focusing on perfect form and staying far away from muscle failure.

It only takes about a minute at a time, but the trade-off is that you have to do it very often, ideally spread out across the day.

Here’s how this might look in practice:

You put a heavy kettlebell in your office, and every time you get an email you grab that kettlebell and do two perfect kettlebell swings. Then you get back to work.

By the time you get 15 emails, you’ve done 30 good form reps. That’s 30 opportunities for your brain to build those strong and efficient neural connections, and it only took you about 15 total minutes.

You’ll also feel great, because you haven’t crushed yourself into the ground and you haven’t created a lot of muscle damage or fatigue.

It might seem too good to be true, but this method really does work to build strength if you do it consistently.

How To Build Strength When You Have No Time To Exercise

Choose a couple of main exercises you want to get better at. They should be big exercises that work many muscles together in a coordinated way. Isolation exercises like bicep curls aren’t a good choice.

Pull ups are a great exercise for this. You could also do push ups, squats, dips, cleans, swings, Turkish getups, handstands, or other skill-based exercises.  

Do just one or two repetitions of that exercise at a time, focusing on perfect form. You shouldn’t feel fatigued afterwards.

Try to accumulate at least 30 reps across the day. For example, you could set an alarm to do two reps every half hour.

You could also tie this practice to a certain location in your environment. Hang a pull up bar in a doorway and do one or two pull ups every time you walk through. Do two perfect squats every time you open the fridge.

Full Body “Greasing The Groove” Weekly Program

If you have no time to exercise, here’s a workout program using this method that works all your major muscle groups across the week.

You’ll “work out” five days per week, focusing on one exercise each day. Aim to accumulate 30 perfect quality reps of the focus exercise across the day.

• Day 1 (Pull) – Pull Ups (band assisted or bodyweight)

• Day 2 (Squat) – Squats (bodyweight or dumbbell)

• Day 3 (Push) – Push Ups (incline, floor, or decline)

• Day 4 (Hinge) – Kettlebell Swings

• Day 5 (Core) – Hanging Leg Raises

Every one to two weeks, make the exercise slightly more difficult. Make sure you can still perform it with perfect form.

For pull ups, you could start with a heavy resistance band to give you some assistance and move to a lighter bad for less assistance. With push ups, you could start on incline push ups (hands elevated on a stable surface) and slowly decrease the incline. For squats you could try to go a little deeper or hold a weight. For swings you could increase the weight, and for leg raises you could lower your legs more slowly.   

If you need to change one of these exercises, see my article on Training Movements Not Muscles for examples of other exercises in the same movement category.

If You Need Help

To learn more about how to set up an effective strength training program, download my FREE Strength Training 101 eBook. This guide will teach you how to get started on your fitness journey, including which exercises to do, how many sets and reps you should do for specific goals, and how to make sure you're progressing your workouts to get the results you want.