Time Saving Tips For Exercise
Can you guess what the most commonly cited obstacle to exercise is? I bet you can.
Many people, including many of my personal training and coaching clients struggle to make time for exercise.
In this article, I want to share some time saving tips for exercise so you can achieve your health and fitness goals and feel great!
A Quick Self-Assessment
When I talk to people about health and fitness, they often say they can’t find the time to exercise. Of course not. You won’t be able to “find” the time. You have to make the time by prioritizing exercise.
Since there are a finite number of hours in the day, and most people aren’t just sitting around doing nothing for long chunks of time, the reality is that you’re going to have to exercise instead of doing something else.
When many people say they don’t have time, they really mean that they’re doing something else with the time they do have.
What do you do with your time? I challenge you to do a little self-assessment.
Get a piece of paper and number the margin with times, starting at midnight. Each line should represent half an hour. Take one day and write down what you’re doing every half hour. You might want to do this for multiple days, but you’ll likely get a decent idea of where your time is going after just one day,
You’ll probably find that there are stretches of time that you spend doing things that don’t really align with your goals, maybe going on social media or watching tv.
You might find that there are opportunities to use your time more efficiently, like combining your tv watching time with your cooking or laundry folding, or ordering groceries to be delivered instead of going out to the store.
Figure out how much time you could realistically make for exercise.
If that’s an hour a day, great.
Maybe it’s less that that. In that case, let’s get to the time saving tips for exercise that will allow you to get the benefits in the time you can make available.
Time Saving Tips For Exercise: Cardio
Before I share these tips (I promise they’re coming!…), it’s important to understand something about cardio intensity.
Physical activity is divided into three intensity categories: light, moderate, and vigorous.
Light exercise is movement that doesn’t really challenge your heart or lungs. It’s very easy. This would be like taking a slow walk. Your heart rate doesn’t increase much and you don’t breathe any harder than usual. This intensity isn't usually enough to significantly increase your health or fitness.
Moderate intensity is an exercise pace that increases your breathing and heart rate a little. It should be noticeable that you’re working, but not too strenuous. This might be a brisk walk or a light jog depending on how fit you are.
Vigorous intensity is hard exercise that increases your heart rate and breathing a lot. It feels very strenuous. That’s a fast jog or a hard run.
It’s recommended by the American Heart Association and the American College Of Sports Medicine (and other organizations around the world) that, to get the health benefits of exercise, you should do:
At least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise
and/or
At least 75 minutes per week of vigorous intensity exercise
or a combination of the two.
The easiest way to measure exercise intensity is by using something called the “talk test”.
At moderate intensity, you should notice that your breathing is heavier. It should be elevated enough that you can still speak in full sentences, but you’re too out of breath to sing.
At vigorous intensity, you should be working so hard that you can only speak a word or two at a time.
Time Saving Tip For Exercise: Break Up Your Moderate Intensity Sessions
If you're doing moderate intensity cardio, you should be aiming for about 30 minutes, 5 days per week.
Finding a continuous 30-minute block can be daunting. The good news is that you don’t have to do it in one big block.
You can break up those sessions and get the same benefits, as long as you’re doing moderate intensity (not light intensity) and you’re accumulating 30 minutes across the day.
You could do a 10-minute brisk walk in the morning, a 10-minute brisk walk at lunch, and a 10-minute brisk walk in the evening. Boom, there’s your 30 minutes.
You could even break it up further, into six 5-minute walks.
Breaking up exercise this way makes it more realistic. Devoting a full 30 minutes sometimes feels like too much, but who doesn’t have time for a 5 minute walk?
I like to think of this as taking “exercise snacks”. Exercise snacks are small, bite-size chunks of exercise spread out across the day.
In this case you end up doing the same amount of total exercise time by the end of the day, but breaking it up makes it much more likely that you’ll actually get it done.
Time Saving Tip For Exercise: Increase Your Intensity
If you want to decrease the total time you spend exercising, you can increase your exercise intensity.
The intensity of your exercise matters a lot. You can get the same benefits in about half the time if you do vigorous intensity exercise compared to moderate intensity.
If you do vigorous intensity cardio, you only have to do 25 minutes, 3 days per week. Or you could do 15 minutes, 5 days a week.
To save time, do harder but shorter bursts of cardio.
Just make sure you’re getting to vigorous intensity. That means working hard enough that you’re too out of breath to speak in full sentences.
Time Saving Tip For Exercise: Increase Your Intensity Even More
Finally, you can get the benefits even faster by doing high intensity interval training.
The concept of interval training has unfortunately been distorted by the fitness industry in recent years, and a lot of the classes and videos that advertise themselves as “HIIT” (high intensity interval training) are not actually high enough intensity or structured correctly to be true HIIT training.
For our purposes in this article, I don’t want to overcomplicate this concept. I’m going to define “high intensity interval training” as cardio exercise with very short bursts of very high intensity, separated by short rests.
Please Keep In Mind: This is something that you should only try if you already have a decent level of fitness. It’s very difficult and not something I would recommend for beginners. If you’re just starting out with your exercise journey or if you have a health condition, talk to your doctor before starting an exercise program and build up a base of cardiovascular fitness with consistent moderate intensity exercise before trying vigorous or HIIT sessions.
If you are ready to try HIIT, here’s how to do it:
Warm up first
Choose a time between 30 seconds and 2 minutes
Run, cycle, swim, row, or do the elliptical as hard as you can, and I really mean as hard as you can, for that amount of time
Rest for the equivalent amount of time. Don't stop completely, just move slowly and catch your breath
Repeat for a total of 10 minutes
For example:
Warm up for 5 minutes
Run 1 minute as hard as you can
Walk 1 minute to rest
Repeat 5 times
Do that 2-3 times a week
Strength Training
Strength training is incredibly important and not enough people do it.
It has many of the same amazing physical and mental health benefits that most people associate with cardio, and I would argue it has even more benefits that you can't get from cardio alone. I highly, highly recommend that everyone be doing strength training.
The minimum recommendations to get the benefits of strength training are to do at least two sessions per week. I recommend aiming for three days or even more if you can.
If you’re just getting started with strength training and need some guidance, download my FREE Strength Training 101 eBook. You’ll learn how to structure an effective strength training program that gets results. Sample workouts are included.
While strength training is incredibly beneficial, a full session can take more than an hour. Here’s how to cut down that time.
Time Saving Tip For Exercise: Train Movements Not Muscles
It’s really important with strength training that you work all your major muscle groups. Often you’ll see programs where you’re supposed to do a separate exercise for each muscle group, like a chest exercise and a quad exercise and a glute exercise and a back exercise.
Depending on how you split them up, there are 8-14 major muscle groups in your body. That’s a lot of exercises to do in each session if you do one for each muscle group.
To save time, you can think about training movements instead of muscles. There are five main movement patterns that you should be doing. Those are: push, pull, squat, hinge, and core activation.
To learn more about each of those movement patterns and why training movements is better for you, check out my full article: Why You Should Train Movements Not Muscles.
If you do those five movements in your workouts, you’ll work all your major muscle groups. That cuts the number of exercises you have to do (and the time it’ll take) in half.
Time Saving Tip For Exercise: Use Supersets Or Trisets
In a typical strength training workout, you’re doing multiple sets of each exercise with rest in between sets so your working muscles can recover enough to give another hard effort in your next set.
The rests are important. If you finish a set and feel ready to immediately do another one, that’s a sign that you’re not challenging your muscles with heavy enough weights. You won’t get good results that way.
To learn more about this, read my article on Choosing the Right Weights For Your Strength Training Exercises.
Let’s say you do a workout with five exercises (one for each of your foundational movement patterns), and rest 1-2 minutes between each one. You could spend 20 minutes or more resting during an hour-long workout.
Here’s a smarter way to do it:
Pair two exercises for different muscle groups together and do one after the other without a rest in between. That’s called a superset.
For example, you might do push ups and squats as a superset. You do 10 push ups, and then you do 10 squats. Then you go back to push ups, then back to squats, and so on.
You can do that with very little rest between exercises because the muscles that you used to do your push ups (your chest, shoulders, and triceps) get a rest while your legs are working on squats.
Similarly, a triset pairs three exercises together. A triset might be: push ups, then squats, then pull ups. Those exercises work mostly different major muscles, so you don’t need to rest much between them.
Using supersets and trisets, you can get the same amount of work done in less time.
Time Saving Tip For Exercise: Break Up Your Workout Into Short “Exercise Snacks”
I mentioned the concept of exercise snacks in the cardio section. You can do exercise snacks for strength training too, by sprinkling in a few exercises at a time across the day.
If you have gym equipment in your home or office, that helps, but it’s not totally necessary.
Here’s an example, using our five foundational movements:
Pull and Hinge:
Before you start work in the morning, do three supersets of one-arm rows (Pull), and deadlifts (Hinge). If you don’t have equipment, you can use anything heavy with a handle for the one-arm rows, like a jug of water or a container of laundry detergent. For deadlifts, you could use a laundry basket or two equally weighted objects with handles, holding one in each hand.
Push:
Break push ups into three sets of 10 done across your workday. Do 10 push ups when you first get to work, 10 push ups before you go to lunch, and 10 push ups before you finish for the day.
Squat:
Incorporate chair squats (or weighted squats holding a dumbbell or something else heavy with a handle) into your daily routine. You could do two squats every time you get an email or a phone call. That could add up to plenty of squats by the end of the day.
Core:
Do three 1-minute planks while watching your evening tv show.
Using these exercise snacks, you could do a whole strength workout across the day and it would only take maybe 15-20 minutes of dedicated workout time.
Sometimes when I suggest this strategy, I get some resistance. People don’t think a handful of squats or push ups here and there could really “count”. I will tell you right now that it absolutely does.
If you have an ingrained idea that exercise has to be done in a certain way or in a certain place to “count”, you are going to miss out on a lot of opportunities to get fitter and healthier. The sooner you expand your definition of how exercise “should” be done, the better.
Any time you’re using and challenging your muscles intentionally, your body and mind are getting healthier.
And let’s be realistic – isn't it better to do a little exercise throughout the day than to do none at all because you don’t have time to get to the gym?
I hope these time saving tips for exercise help you be more active so you can support your health and well-being!