Not having time is the biggest excuse people use for not able to get in a workout. You find that your days are filled with running errands, work, your social life, and feeling lazy. Feeling lazy is fine. But being a couch potato and feeling sorry for yourself has no place.
We decided to give a guideline so that you have no reason for using “not enough time” as an excuse.
Let’s make something clear. When we talk about a fitness and training, we are talking about making the time to exercise. This is aside from your overall activity levels.
Step 1: What is your fitness goal?
You must have a goal before you even start a workout plan. Stronger? Fat loss? Build muscle? Be more active? Live a healthier life? Run a marathon? Become more confident?
Doing something with no reason is a sure way to not care about it.
Step 2: How much time can you devote to training?
Now that you have a goal, let’s see if it’s realistic with the time you want to devote to training. Again, you want to better yourself and making time for it is important. We recommend the minimum of time to 2 hours of training.
Training Time Devoted (TTD) Guidelines:
2 Hours:
- 15 minutes x 7 days
- 20 minutes x 6 days
- 30 minutes x 4 days
- 60 minutes x 2 days
3 Hours/week:
- 30 minutes x 2 days, 60 minutes x 2 days
- 60 minutes x 3 days
- 30 minutes x 4 days, 60 minutes x 2 days
4 Hours/week:
- 60 minutes x 4 days
- 30 minutes x 4 days, 60 minutes x 2 days
Realistically, 4 hours seems to be the cutoff point for many people who work full time jobs and want to live a balanced life.
Step 3: What sort of training/exercise do you like?
This is important. Do something you enjoy. Although we are bias towards weight training because we believe it’s the best mode of exercise, some people aren’t into it. But honestly, training with weights is superior.
But if you’d rather stick with bodyweight exercises, calisthenics, cardio, and yoga – that’s cool with us too.
Here’s what you need to do. Look at your goal and devoted time. Once you have those two down, you’ll need to look at what sort of training you must do in order to achieve your goal.
We will look at building muscle, losing fat, and maybe becoming a better runner to give you an idea.
- Building Muscle: 2-4 hours of resistance training that works your whole body. Use 3-5 sets of 5-12 repetitions with 6-8 exercises. If you only have 2 hours, use 8 exercises that trains the whole body. With 4 hours, use 6 exercises. Use 45-90 seconds rest in between sets.
- Losing Fat: Only feel you can get in two solid hours of train, do 60 minutes of a combination of resistance training and HIIT. Perform 6-8 exercises covering the whole body, using 6-15 repetitions, and no rest to 30 seconds in between sets. After, do 10 minutes of HIIT.
- Better Runner (Marathon): 3 hours a week where you can get two 30 minutes sessions in and two 60 minutes sessions in. Here’s how we’d break it down:
- 30 minutes of resistance training focusing on strength; deadlift, squat, bench, pull-ups, rows, military press, push press, lunges, rear foot elevated split squats
- 30 minutes of running
- 60 minutes of running (distance)
- 30 minutes of running (speed day) training followed by 30 minutes of resistance t raining.
Step 4: Put it in your schedule
Once you know how much time and what you will be doing, place it in your calendar and stick to it. If you just push it to the side and forget about it, then you will never reach your goal. It’s like as if you skip a work meeting because you didn’t feel like going over and over again. Guess what happens. Your ass gets fired.
You will never achieve a goal if you don’t give it a priority or the time.
Step 5: Enjoy the Process
There are no shortcuts. So don’t try and look for one or get sucked into an idea from some informercial. Learn to enjoy the process, learn about your body, and remember that there is never only one way.
When you enjoy the process, the results will come and you would have gained the experience and knowledge to continue.
Now just to be clear. The above times and training are just examples. There are so many different variations of timing and training. But we hope that this gives you a starting point towards looking at the big picture. Also, you have to be realistic about what you want to achieve. Saying that you want to improve your marathon time but don’t want to run, probably isn’t the smartest thing.
If you have any questions, put them in the comment section below and we’d be happy to answer them.
