Ways you can make resistance training more time efficient
A few ideas on how to get the most bang for your buck time-wise during your lifting sessions:
1. Remove junk volume - you probably don’t need to hit small muscle groups
with multiple exercises and sets to yield strength or hypertrophy
adaptations. When you may only get to train a couple of hours a week
does it really matter which small group of fibres in a muscle group are
getting slightly more focus? No, consistently progressing an exercise
that targets that muscle group is more important.
2. Use
mostly compound movements - these multi-joint exercises recruit more
muscle groups, more muscle fibres and use more energy in the same time
frame and should be the skeleton of your sessions. Flesh them out with
more targeted isolation exercises afterwards.
3. Utilise
supersets and complexes - 2 or more exercises sharing a rest means you
can pack more exercises into your session. This can be very effective
when different areas of the body are used in each exercise to limit
the fatigue of one exercise on the other.
4. Incorporate
mobility exercises between sets - 2-3 minute rests are going to be
needed between sets of exercises. Mobility drills aren’t particularly
fatiguing, so rather than doing nothing, or scrolling on your phone,
mobility drills can be incorporated during inter-set rest. More mobility
means lower injury risk and over time potentially greater range of
motion for some of your exercises meaning getting more out of every rep.
Instead of struggling to find a time for your mobility or motivating
yourself to do so independently, incorporating it into your strength
session can make it easier to stay consistent.