Time-saving Fitness

Our fitness expert offers tips on how to exercise when you don't have time to spare.

We all tend to work too much, sleep too little, stress too much, and do not exercise enough. Work, deadlines, kids, carpools, and doctors’ appointments don’t leave much time in the day to take care of ourselves. Exercising even an hour a day is not practical for many. But a new study, published in The Journal of Physiology, shows that short bursts of very intense exercise – equivalent to only a few minutes per day – can produce the same results as traditional training. “The most striking finding from our study was the remarkably similar improvements in muscle health and performance induced by two such diverse training strategies,” says Martin Gibala, an associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University.

Here are a few guidelines to follow.

Getting to your exercise equipment should be easy and convenient. If you have to drive half an hour to get to a gym, you will view working out as a chore. If you spend more time traveling to the gym than you do in the gym, you might want to consider a program that you can do in your home. Muscles do not care where the resistance comes from – they are going to respond. Resistance can be from body weight (push-ups), bands, free weights, machines, or a combination of any of these.

Choose exercises that work several major muscle groups at the same time. Squats or leg presses work quadriceps, hamstrings, buttocks, and calves. Essentially, you will be training four muscle groups at the same time with these exercises.

Skip the usual minute or so of resting time between exercises. You can do this by doing “supersets.” These can be done one of two ways: The first is to do two or more exercises in a row for the same muscle group without any rest in between. For example, do a set of shoulder presses and follow them immediately with a set of lateral raises. This saves time, forces a lot more blood into the shoulders and provides a more intense and effective training stimulus for the shoulder muscles. The second way to do supersets is to train two opposing muscle groups without any rest in between. You can use this superset style of training for two different muscle groups, but only if they have an agonist/antagonist relationship with each other. In other words, on any given lift, one muscle is contracting and the other muscle is relaxing (such as the biceps and triceps when performing a bicep curl). Choose muscle groups that are physically close together such as biceps and triceps, or chest and back, or quadriceps and hamstrings.

Have alternate exercises for each muscle group. This is especially important for those who are pressed for time. Often there will be someone working on the piece of equipment you want to use. You should always have a back-up plan, an alternate exercise that trains the same muscle group.

Do turbo-training cardio workouts. Slow, steady- paced cardio workouts are not efficient and take a lot of time. Five to 10, 30- to 60-second high intensity intervals will help maintain muscle strength and burn more fat in half the time.

Gerry Halverson is a personal trainer. He trains at Newport Workout in Newport Beach and can be reached at (949) 290-5427.

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