20 Minute Workouts

A lot of people believe that you need to be in the gym working out for an hour or two in order to see any results. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact I would say you can get a better workout in 40 minutes than you could in 90 minutes.

The past few days I’ve been really busy with work stuff since my vacation so I’ve really been cutting my workouts short. My workouts have been around 25 minutes long, but I’ve actually had pretty good workouts in that time.

So how can you get a good workout in with just 20 minutes?

The first thing you need to do is shorten your rest time. Just from being in the gym I see that most people rest for about 2 minutes on average I’d say between sets. If you get a timer and rest no more than 40-60 seconds you can really save a lot of time over the course of the workout.

You can also incorporate either a circuit or supersets (or tri sets). A circuit involves performing a number of exercises back to back. So for example you could have 5 different exercises and perform them all in a row, take a quick break and start from the number one again. For example: bench press, deadlifts, lateral raise, pull down, curls, repeat. A superset is doing to exercises back to back with no rest, while a tri set is just doing three exercises in a row before resting. I recommend working different muscles for each exercise when you’re doing this to give your muscles time to rest.

Another tip would be to make sure you have your workout planned before you get to the gym. Have it written out in your workout journal so you can easily go through the workout without thinking about what you’re doing next.

My final tip is if you want a really good fat burning workout try skipping (or doing burpees) for 40 second intervals between each set of each exercise, rest for 10 and then get right back into the next set. The workout would look like this:

Bench press x 10
Skip for 40 seconds (with 10 seconds rest)
Bench press x 10
Skip for 40 seconds
Bench press x 10
Skip for 40 seconds
Pull ups x max
Skip for 40 seconds
etc

This is a killer workout and will give you almost no time to catch your breathe.

I would say that in a typical hour workout that most people do at the gym they are resting for about 40 minutes. Cut out that rest time and you should be able to get your workouts down to 20 minutes when you need to.