5 More Reasons Your Workout Is Too Long

One of the biggest problems people have making progress in the gym is time. You want to get stronger or lose weight or bulk up, but you’re constantly short on time. You need to find a way to do all the work needed, but still be in and out of the gym quickly. I wrote an article a while ago with some tips for that, but maybe your workouts are still taking too long. See if any of the following are reasons why and find out how to fix them.

You don’t superset exercises. Supersets are great for making your workouts more efficient. The idea is simple: pick two exercises, do a set of the first, a set of the second, then rest and repeat. Now you wouldn’t just do this randomly. It’s best to pair two exercises that don’t use the same body parts. An example of a good pairing would be dumbbell bench press and cable rows. An example of a bad pairing would be deadlifts and good mornings. The reasoning is that while you do the dumbbell bench your chest and triceps are working while your back and biceps rest. Then when you’re doing the cable rows, your back and biceps work while the chest and triceps rest. This means you can take less rest in between sets and save time working out.

You do different exercises every workout. I don’t mean doing body part splits and having back, chest, arm, and leg days. I mean when you change the exercises you do on those days like celebrities change their spouses. The reason this isn’t a good idea is there’s a learning curve on each exercise. Yes, some are very simple to do. But if you’ve ever tried a new exercise, you’ll notice that you improve in it very quickly for the first couple of workouts you use it. It’s not because you magically got stronger or bigger. It’s because you learned how to do the thing. If you don’t ever learn to do the exercise, you can’t use as much muscle or train that muscle hard. Instead of changing the exercises so frequently, stick with them for at least six to eight weeks and really try to push progress on them.

You do too many fancy rep schemes. You’re doing cluster sets for your squats, followed by leg press with drop sets. After that, you’ll use rest-pause on your Romanian deadlifts before finishing with bloodflow restriction for your calf raises... I think you get the idea. All of these things tend to take longer than regular sets and reps and, even worse for your time-saving, often take time to set up. Most of your exercises should use regular set and rep schemes like the classic three sets of ten. If you’re going to do the fancy stuff, pick one exercise and do it. You might say “Well, 12-time Mr. Olympia Billy Bigbiceps did bloodflow restriction drop sets on Bulgarian split squats.” That might be true, but you’re not him. He uses that stuff because he’s that advanced and it’s the only thing that gets him any progress. And if you have to ask “Am I advanced?” then you’re not advanced.

You’re trying to do too much in one workout. This is similar to the “doing too many exercises” one in the previous list, but what it means here is trying to ride too many horses with one ass. You walk in and start with a mobility routine. So far, so good. Then you do depth jumps, hurdle hops, and medicine ball throws to build explosiveness. After this, you move on to heavy squats, bench pressing, and barbell rows for strength. Then you remember it’s back day for your muscle-building work, so you hit six exercises to build up your back. But you can’t neglect aerobic power, so now it’s off to the sled pushes, 40 yards for ten sets. Finally you take care of your cardio for heart health, so 45 minutes on the treadmill. After three hours, you finally leave the gym. See the problem? You’re trying to build everything at once. As a result, you do all of those things badly and waste a bunch of time. Instead, pick one or two things and focus on that for the workout. This means you’ll actually get to work those things properly and, even more importantly, recover and adapt afterwards.

You don’t hit each exercise hard enough. This is often the cause of some of the above issues. The people I train are often shocked when they look at the workout we’re doing and see only five or six exercises. “This is it? I can do more than that.” And then we actually do the workout. At the end I ask if they want to do more. Almost every time, once they’ve gotten off the floor and started breathing normally again, the answer is “no.” This is because instead of having you go moderate on a dozen exercises, I have you go hard on half that many. The result is that you’re doing less, but getting more out of each one. You get to save time and make progress because you’re actually challenging yourself.

Maybe you’ve been taking too long in the gym for the above reasons. Now you’ve got solutions that can save you time and let you get back to the rest of your life. Our time is the only resource we can’t make more of, so using it as well as possible is really important. And now that you’ve got ten total things you can do to save time, you can’t use lack of time as excuse anymore. Get in there and kick some ass.