Lack of time is no excuse
We currently live in a world in which people are always in a hurry, keeping busy with work, running several errands a day, and trying to keep the Family and the closest friends nearby – not to mention the incessant and highly addictive TV series in Netflix! In other words, saving some time to exercise and make a habit our of it is kind of hard – especially if we follow some people’s ideas, that say we need to spend about an hour and a half at the gym every day.
Can we change this perspective? The biggest problem is the current model prescribed by personal trainers everywhere, usually based in the ‘the more, the merrier’ idea, making training sessions too extensive and sometimes incoherent.
What if we told you that we can go a different way? What if we told you most of what you hear about the ideal amount of training is not correct, would you believe us?
Well, please do, because that’s exactly the case. Researchers Ralph Carpinneli and Richard Winett, back in 2003, published an article in Journal of Behavioral Medicine questioning the necessity of adopting the traditional 30-minute-aerobic-exercise plus the 24-weightlifting-series (a process that usually taken about an hour and 30 minutes to be completed).
In their research, the authors used only four minutes of cycling at an 80% maximum cardiac frequency, and a six-rep series involving six different exercises – a combination that took about 20 minutes to complete. The participants of this research improved their respiratory capacity in 13.4%, and their strength in 34%.
Other researches, such as Trapp and colleagues’, who proved that a 20-minute HIIT (high intensity interval training) a week is enough for reducing fat, confirm Winett and Carpinneli’s discovery.
In weightlifting, studies by Rhea et al. and Wernborn show that, for beginners, a three-times-a-week frequency and a four-sets of exercises per muscular group is the ideal combination for improving strength and hypertrophy. These researches have also proved that, for people who already train, the number of sets is the same (four) as the adopted for beginners, possibly reaching six sets per exercise – in this case with a lower weekly frequency (only twice). For athletes, the number of sets reaches eight, maintaining the two-times-a-week schedule.
As incredible as this may seem, the more experienced you are, the best answers were found in less amounts of training periods (less training time), being these inversely proportional to the intensity of the work. That’s right, the more intense the training session is, the less time you’ll be spending at the gym during your already busy week.
The message we would like to pass here refers to a better planning of the weightlifting schedules, a planning that respects the person’s needs, that unveils the best way towards each person’s personal aims. In other words, it is possible to train for short amounts of time every week, and still get better results than if you were training for almost two hours daily. Even because, nowadays, spending over 45 minutes of our days in the gym is definitely not the best alternative for our busy routines.
Based on all this, we wonder: is it really time we lack in order to change our lifestyles, or is it just the lack of an appropriate orientation?
Can we change this perspective? The biggest problem is the current model prescribed by personal trainers everywhere, usually based in the ‘the more, the merrier’ idea, making training sessions too extensive and sometimes incoherent.
What if we told you that we can go a different way? What if we told you most of what you hear about the ideal amount of training is not correct, would you believe us?
Well, please do, because that’s exactly the case. Researchers Ralph Carpinneli and Richard Winett, back in 2003, published an article in Journal of Behavioral Medicine questioning the necessity of adopting the traditional 30-minute-aerobic-exercise plus the 24-weightlifting-series (a process that usually taken about an hour and 30 minutes to be completed).
In their research, the authors used only four minutes of cycling at an 80% maximum cardiac frequency, and a six-rep series involving six different exercises – a combination that took about 20 minutes to complete. The participants of this research improved their respiratory capacity in 13.4%, and their strength in 34%.
Other researches, such as Trapp and colleagues’, who proved that a 20-minute HIIT (high intensity interval training) a week is enough for reducing fat, confirm Winett and Carpinneli’s discovery.
In weightlifting, studies by Rhea et al. and Wernborn show that, for beginners, a three-times-a-week frequency and a four-sets of exercises per muscular group is the ideal combination for improving strength and hypertrophy. These researches have also proved that, for people who already train, the number of sets is the same (four) as the adopted for beginners, possibly reaching six sets per exercise – in this case with a lower weekly frequency (only twice). For athletes, the number of sets reaches eight, maintaining the two-times-a-week schedule.
As incredible as this may seem, the more experienced you are, the best answers were found in less amounts of training periods (less training time), being these inversely proportional to the intensity of the work. That’s right, the more intense the training session is, the less time you’ll be spending at the gym during your already busy week.
The message we would like to pass here refers to a better planning of the weightlifting schedules, a planning that respects the person’s needs, that unveils the best way towards each person’s personal aims. In other words, it is possible to train for short amounts of time every week, and still get better results than if you were training for almost two hours daily. Even because, nowadays, spending over 45 minutes of our days in the gym is definitely not the best alternative for our busy routines.
Based on all this, we wonder: is it really time we lack in order to change our lifestyles, or is it just the lack of an appropriate orientation?
Author : Treino Consciente
Posted in: 10/16/2017
Last modified: 10/01/2025
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