How Much Time For Fitness?

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