“Muscular people don’t have jobs! Or else, their job is to be muscular”.
Many believe that when you have a full-time job, a family to support and hobbies, you cannot achieve that “dream physique”.
FAUX !
Achieve your goals shouldn’t take 2 hours of your time a dayprovided you do it well…
Bodybuilding is not your life, you want to spend time with your spouse and your children, I get it.
So let’s see 7 proven tricks to reduce time spent in the weight roomnot the muscles!
1) Exercise less
Your favorite influencer’s favorite influencer does 7 exercises per muscle group and you tell yourself that to look like him, you’re going to have to do the same.
Most people have too many exercises in their programs.
Good for them if they have time to waste, but we want to optimize.
Here’s all you really need:
- A squat movement,
- A hinge movement (hips hinge),
- A vertical pushing movement,
- A horizontal pushing movement,
- A vertical pulling movement,
- A horizontal pulling movement,
- A little calf and abs work.
And that’s all, you don’t need multiple exercises for every muscle area!
You see those people doing bench presses, then incline bench presses, then push-ups… waste of timeall of this belongs to the same category: horizontal thrust.
Yes, you’re only going to do one exercise per muscle group, but you’re going to work it 3-4 times a week, that’s more than enough to stimulate muscle growth.
From the point of view of the duration of your workouts, it is a huge time saver.
Pick one exercise for each category from the list above and practice it with perfect form. Get close to failure on each set and the stimulus will be there!
2) Choose the right exercises
It seems logical that since we are going to keep one movement per muscle group, we might as well choose it!
The smartest thing is obviously to dig into polyarticular exercises:
- Squats and variations (front squats, hack squats, Bulgarian squats, back lunges),
- Deadlift, straight leg deadlift,
- Overhead press, weighted dips,
- Bench press (barbell, dumbbells, incline, decline, etc.),
- Weighted pull-ups, pulley pull-ups, bent-over rows, pendlay rows,
- Horizontal Pulley Pull,
In short, we want to hit several muscle groups in one movement, it is by far the best investment for our time!
It is not necessary to do isolation exercises for muscles that have already been worked to failure on polyarticular exercises.
3) Do fewer sets
This is the other big mistake. Have you ever seen some people’s training volume on Monday on “chest day”?
5 sets of bench press, 5 sets of incline, 4 sets of decline, 5 sets of pulley fly to finish with weighted dips.
More is not always better!
This meta-analysis reveals that 2-3 sets add about 40% more hypertrophy compared to a single set, but 4-6 sets add nothing significant compared to 2-3 sets.
Choose one exercise per muscle group, do 2 or 3 intense series with good form and go home.
On the other hand, I insist on the “intense”, give everything you have and go as close as possible to failure.
By focusing on the 6 moves seen above (plus some calf and ab exercises) with 2-3 sets, you’ll dramatically reduce your time in the gym.
We talk more about the optimal number of sets in our complementary article: Bodybuilding: more muscles in less time, here is the only valid method.
4) Do fewer sessions
We have just seen how to spend less time per session, but we can still reduce the total time spent in the gym per week.
What is the ideal number of sessions per week? The one that gives you enough recovery!
It usually takes at least 48 hours for your muscles to recover.
This study reveals, for example, that only 20% of subjects had fully recovered after 48 hours.
In the same study and after 72 hours, 63% of subjects (trained men) had not fully recovered.
Note that the test included 12 sets to failurewhich reinforces the idea that a large number of series can be counterproductive.
In this study, 40% of the subjects (trained men aged 18-30) had recovered after 48 hours and 80% after 72 hours.
As the test increased from 3 to 7 sets, full recovery took up to 96 hours.
The aforementioned study also tested older men (50-65 years old) and even after 96 hours, 70% of these men were not fully recovered!
Conclusion, the older you arethe greater the recovery becomes.
According to this, it seems that three full body workouts (FULL BODY) on non-consecutive days are sufficient, leaving 72 hours between workouts, like this:
- Jour 1 : FULL BODY,
- Play 2: Rest,
- Day 3: Rest,
- Jour 4 : FULL BODY,
- Day 5: Rest,
- Day 6: Rest,
- Day 7: Whole body,
The Full Body format seems to be the most conducive to anyone who wants to spend the least amount of time indoors and get results.
That being said, if you want to train over several consecutive days, opt for an upper body / lower body distribution, example:
- Day 1: Upper body,
- Day 2: Lower body,
- Day 3: Rest,
- Day 4: Upper body,
- Day 5: Lower body,
- Day 6: Rest,
- Day 7: Upper body (or rest to do a 7 day cycle).
The best format to make your time in the gym profitable could be the FULL BODY. With 3 sessions per week, you would leave enough time for your muscles to recover between each session and could hope for good results by devoting no more than 2.5 hours of muscular work per week!
5) Less loss of concentration
You now have a better selection of your exercises, fewer sets, fewer sessions and less time spent in the gym. The last thing to do is to make this short time as efficient as possible!
A mobile phone and Instagram is a dead loss of 40% of your productivity…
You have just finished your series and here you are scrolling through Instagram…bim, 5 minutes wasted!
The best advice: put your phone in airplane mode!
The music, ok, the taking of notes during the sessions, ok, the timing, ok.
Everything else, no.
The same is true if you train with a partner. It’s great for motivation, but if you spend your time joking and chatting, it’s a waste of time!
Make sure you and your partner are on the same page, you’ll gossip in the sauna.
Bonus: save yourself time in the kitchen too
You know bodybuilding isn’t just about training, right.
We talked about recovery, there is still the nutrition aspect.
Eating nutritious meals doesn’t have to be time-consuming.
The best way to save you time in the kitchen is to opt for a few “passive kitchen” appliances:
- pressure cooker, the best way to prepare perfect rice and many more things (legumes),
- an oven, to cook all your small vegetables at once, and more,
- an oil-free fryer, to have fun without guilt (ideal also for fish),
- a robot cooker, thermomix type.
In short, all this is very useful for not having to stay behind the pan to stir the grub.
Spend a minimum of time on the preparations and go about your business!
What to remember?
That the excuse “I don’t have time” is unfortunately not a good one!
You don’t take the time, that’s different. We all have 24 hours ahead of us every day, we have to make sure we free up time for the things that matter most to us, especially when it comes to health.
Bodybuilding is certainly not your job, nor your passion, but good news, it doesn’t have to take you 10 hours a week!
With a few adjustments, we can very well drastically reduce the time spent in the gym (by creating a gym at home, we can go even further).
If your goal is to be healthy and build muscle, a minimalist approach will be more than enough.
Do you find it hard to believe? Try and adjust.
Maybe you think you need 3 exercises of 5 sets for your pecs and maybe it even works, but just because something works doesn’t mean it’s the best approach…
Who says it wouldn’t work just as well with just one exercise?
Either way, be sure to control your loads with good movement form and use maximum intensity.
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