6 min readingYou might not be using them yet, but short workouts can be an incredibly effective way of developing your own fitness and might just be the key to your fitness success. In this article, we’ll be looking at four of the biggest reasons why you might want to give them a try.
Short Workouts Provide Quality over Quantity
There’s this strange phenomenon in which people like to boast about how much time they spend in the gym…
“I spend 1 hour a day”
“I spend 2 hours a day”
“I spend 10 hours a week”
First of all, literally no-one cares how much time you spend in the gym. And second of all, time spent in the gym is definitely not the same as time spent achieving results. For example, let’s say we have two people who both go to the gym four times per week, we’ll call them Jack and Jill.
Jack goes to the gym 4 times per week and spends 2 hours there each time. The problem is, he spends at least 30 minutes of that time chatting with his friends, 15 minutes messing around on his phone, and at least another 15 minutes on top of that checking himself out in the mirror. Plus, by the end of the session he’s tired, so he’s only picking the exercises he likes and he’s sort of giving them half-effort.
Jill on the other hand goes to the gym 4 times per week and spends 1 hour there each time. Unlike Jack, however, she spends the entire time focused and working hard. She picks the most effective exercises and she attacks them with 100% effort each and every workout.
On paper, Jack LOOKS like he’s doing twice the amount of training, but in reality they’re both doing an equal amount of training, only Jill’s training is way more time-efficient.
That’s the difference between quality and quantity.
You can accomplish amazing things for your fitness with surprisingly little time, provided you’re willing to work really hard, and by using shorter workouts you’re able to really prioritize the quality of your sessions.
Short Workouts Are Incredibly Time-efficient
Building on the point about quality over quantity, short workouts are also great because of how efficient they are. Instead of having to find 90 minutes or 2 hours to train, all you have to do is find a suitable 20–30-minute slot. This makes all those “I’m too busy” excuses fade away.
Plus, it gives you the flexibility to train before work, at lunch, after work, or around other commitments. If you have children, for example, finding an hour to exercise uninterrupted can seem like an impossible task, but if you pop an episode of their favourite TV program on and distract them for twenty minutes, you’ll have just long enough for you to get a great, short workout in.
It’s also worth considering just what you could do with all the extra time that you’ll have saved for yourself by not having super long workouts…
- You could use the extra time to hit the kitchen and cook plenty of healthy, nutritious meals that will help to move you towards your fitness goals.
- Or you could take some extra time each day for mindfulness and meditation to reduce your stress levels and help you stay positive.
Short Workouts Make It Easier to Maintain Your Exercise Habits
We don’t have to tell you that one of the hardest things about starting an exercise program is getting into the habit of regular training. Plus, once you get knocked out of that habit, it can be hard to reestablish it. That’s why people can go from genuinely feeling like it was easy to exercise five times per week, to struggling to exercise even once.
Short workouts go a long way towards solving this problem by making it so much easier for you to maintain your exercise habits. Finding the time for a 15 or 20-minute home-based training session is considerably easier than finding 90 to 120 minutes to go out and practice your half-marathon distance running!
Psychologically, short workouts also feel less daunting, especially when you’re not really feeling up to a training session. Let’s be honest, when it’s cold and dark and you’re tired in the evening, it can sometimes be incredibly hard to motivate yourself to head out to the gym for an hour. On the other hand, I bet you could convince yourself into doing a twenty minute at-home yoga session right?
At the end of the day doing some training, even if it’s just a little bit, is always going to be better than doing no training.
Short Workouts Have Virtual Follow Along Options
One of the best advances in fitness over the past decade is the proliferation of easily accessible short online videos and workouts that you can follow along. Gone are the days when all you had was an old exercise VHS type, now you’ve got hundreds, even thousands of short workouts that you can follow along in real time. Not only does this give a tonne of flexibility, it’s also incredibly motivating.
What’s more, with virtual personal trainer technology like Kemtai available, you can even access real-time analysis and feedback on your technique. This allows you to improve your technique, reduce your injury risk and increase the effectiveness of your workouts in a way that’s previously only been possible by working face to face with a coach or trainer.
And the key to all this is the length of the workouts. 10 to 20-minute workouts are easy to plan, easy to film and easy to upload to sharing platforms. This means that far more trainers, coaches and fitness enthusiasts have been getting involved and uploading fitness content for you to enjoy.
Short Workout Summary
If you’ve read all the way through, you now know that there are four main reasons why short workouts might just be the key to your fitness success. They’re a great way to keep training quality high, they’re time-efficient, they make it easier to maintain exercise habits, plus they give you access to a whole new range of follow along video and technology-supported training.
So if you’re stuck in a bit of an exercise rut, and feel like you want to change things up, seriously consider bringing some short workouts into your weekly routine. We think you’ll quickly see just how effective they can be.
