Like most serious sports athletes, you’ll do whatever it takes to become successful. Because it’s important, you’ll find the time, make time, and commit to practicing specific sports skills, team practice/strategy sessions, conditioning, strength training, and other necessary components. If you’re a non-athlete, but enjoy exercising to get fit, lose fat, gain muscle, become stronger, or achieve another goal, you’ll also find a way to train consistently if you’re committed to achieving your goals.
Both athletes and non-athletes occasionally face the reality of being pressed for time. That hour you thought you had now becomes twenty minutes. Work, school, family obligations, extracurricular events, unexpected emergencies, travel, etc. can get in the way of even the best-designed training schedule, thus Plan B – a shorter session – is employed. Plan B is still a plan, so it shouldn’t render a training session useless. In fact, it can be a better fit in many cases, especially when it comes to conditioning and strength training exercise sessions.
Plenty of legitimate research shows that brief, demanding exercise sessions produce results similar to lengthier, lower-level sessions (Study at McMaster University; National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Japan; Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research; European Journal of Applied Physiology; Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research). In other words, instead of a 45-minute session, a 20-minute session will suffice if you train really hard! Why not? That’s an extra 25 minutes to devote to something else.
Knowing that brief, intense conditioning, and strength training are effective, let’s take a look at some examples. Literally, there are hundreds of exercise, drill, run, workout prescription, and time-to-complete combinations that can be used. That is a good thing because it will allow your specific situation to be addressed and you’ll have plenty of variety to choose from.
Here are a few ideas:
