How Much Time For Fitness? Intensity Trumps Everything

By Author: Marty Gallagher
Total Articles: 5
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What's the minimum weekly time investment you can slide by with and still make gains? I would say six cumulative hours. Six times sixty is 360 minutes and this amount of time would allow for three 60-minute weight training sessions and six 30-minute cardio sessions per week. Assuming you had a serious dietary effort in place, assuming the training was smart, primitive and intense, assuming you were a relatively untrained individual (experienced athletes would find six cumulative hours weekly a plausible maintenance regimen) I could about guarantee that you would make gains with a six hour weekly time investment.

At some point, as with every training program, the gains would cease and you would have to reshuffle the deck BUT the answer to fixing the stagnation might not lie in extending or increasing the amount of time devoted to fitness. Just because gains cease using a six hour regimen does not automatically mean the solution is to train more - the remedy could be to train smarter (change the routine) or harder (generate more intensity) within the allotted six hour timeframe. Folks who train real hard and real intense ...
... and don't mess around don't need a lot of gym time. In my opinion, when it comes to triggering progressive resistance gains, intensity trumps everything! By training super hard we don't have to spend hours in the gym.

Home training can reduce the amount of time needed to mount a serious effort even further by eliminating travel time. The commute to and from the commercial fitness establishment takes time and gas. Even when I belonged to clubs and gyms, I always had a flat bench, a set of weights and some adjustable dumbbells lying around at home. Those pressed for time who train at home can slip in sets of curls or overhead presses, shrugs or bent over rows, calf raises or lateral raises, all while discharging household duties. You would be amazed how many sets of presses or curls or tricep presses a person can get in between yard work, dishes, vacuuming, straightening up or watching the news. I used to make myself do a set to failure in a particular exercise while watching football on TV. I might pick the standing overhead press with a set of 70's.

Every time I got up for any reason during the football game I would walk to the laundry room and rep to failure using the solid dumbbells. Walk into the room, clean them to my shoulders and ram them overhead as many times as possible. Then continue on with whatever it was I was doing; it took less than a minute to do the actual set itself. I figured since I was being a couch potato, the least I could do is every time I got up to get something to eat, use the bathroom or stretch my legs, I might as well do something constructive, so I'd walk to the laundry room clean and press the dumbbells to failure, maybe 12-15 reps. Then I'd forget all about it and go right back to what I was doing.

One afternoon I slipped in something like 22 sets to failure. Kinda cool. Kinda felt right. I would rotate exercises and it became sort of famous and I'd have a lot of guys drop over to watch the games and they'd all wanna get in on the action at whatever level they were at. It got humorous late in the second game after everyone had been drinking beer. I moved away and that ended this bizarre practice but was a time when at every commercial the boys would stampede to the laundry room and everyone would grab a set from the dumbbell racks adjacent to the giant screen TV in the knotty-pine rec room. Beer and barbells. No one ever got hurt but a lot of guys got so sore that they had to call into work on Monday sick.

If you've got six hours a week to spare you can establish a fitness toehold. From a toehold comes a foothold and soon a leg up. Do I suggest drinking booze and doing countless sets of weight training exercises? No, that would be imprudent and inappropriate: three weight training sessions, six cardio sessions, tight diet and BAM! Within 21-days you're looking significantly better: at the end of six weeks people are commenting on how totally transformed you are. Hard work pays off. Better one hour intense than six hours lackadaisical. If you have the time we have various training and dietary templates to sort through. If you can find the time we can provide the game plan.
About the Author Marty Gallagher is a former fitness columnist for washingtonpost.com. Marty's work has been featured in magazines such as Muscle & Fitness, Muscle Media, and Powerlifting USA. His website, http://www.martygallagher.com, assimilates years of accumulated knowledge from the athletic elite and makes them available to the common person.