are there days where you only train certain parts of your body / only do certain exercises because you simply don’t have the time for a full workout?
my ideal workout means stair climbing, running-walking and stretching. It can well last 2 hours.
Some days I don’t have enough time to do all that. Would it be better to do less of each kind of exercising or just to fixate on one kind?
I do 20-30 minutes every second day.
One day - Body weight exercises at home, variations of pushups and tabata.
Two days later - Exercise bike, burning 300 calories in 30 mins.
Nothing special but keeps my heart, arms and legs pretty strong without a huge time investment.
It all depends on your goal. Wanna look ripped, you need hours in the gym. Want to just have a body that doesn’t hurt and feels good, then its enough with moderate exercise.
Ummmmmmm…I work like 20 hours a day, 6 days a week. 90% of the time I don’t even know what day it is. How would I EVER have time to lift heavy things???
You’re aware of low-volume HIIT? Max 15 minutes per day, evidence-based for cardiovascular health same as “normal” exercise. Not for building muscle afaik, and finding your own among the many more-or-less tested ones can be a chore. The popular “Scientific 7-minute workout” and it new versions would probably be a good place to start, and are targeted more for building strength afaik.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37939367/ https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/
Edit: Oh, and to answer your question, I don’t. I do move about by bike and play BeatSaber because it’s fun, otherwise decomposing.
For me personally; no excuses. I have nasty ADHD and am very dependent on habit. I have to make a conscious effort to establish any activity as a habit if I want any hope of following through. This forces me to have a ‘no excuses’ type relationship with things like running, my favourite workout activity, if I want to keep it up in the long run.
I switched to working out at home and saved a whole bunch of time I used to spend getting to and from the gym, plus all the faffing about waiting to get on the stations I wanted to use. Its not going to work for everyone but if you can do some sort of workout at home or at work if you lucky enough to work somewhere that has facilitates, then you can save a whole bunch of time.
As others have mentioned switching to high intensity can give you as big an impact in a lot less time. Unless you training for endurance events spending a couple of hours working out everyday can actually be counter productive. I used to train twice a day six days a week, an hours weights in the morning then two to three hours of BJJ/Kickboxing and I never made the same strength gains as when I toned that shit down.
Two hours is pretty excessive, you should be doing 10 minutes stretching tops, unless its an actual stretching workout such as yoga or you are working out an injury. Spending an hour on a stair master or a runner is only good if you actually challenging your heart rate during that time, and then only if you working on endurance for a reason.
Can you walk to a place instead of drive daily?
I replaced a 10 minute commute with a 45 minute walk. Got me walking nearly 8 hours a week. ~20 miles.
I think building it into your routine rather than making it an event is key.
Two ways:
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prioritize your time. If something is important to you then you adjust other things to make time. Such as spending less time on social media aka lemmy.
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shorter duration, higher intensity.
For you if you’re short on time id focus on running- walking, pushing yourself to run more frequently than if you had the full 2 hours. The idea is to get your heart rate up higher than normal
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You do what you can, when you can.
Like, I’m disabled now, so the days of three hour long dedicated workout sessions are long gone. I can barely manage anything that takes longer than cooking a decent meal, and the more impact there is, the shorter the time gets. So, you know, serious cardio is out.
However, you can exercise anywhere, any time, assuming the situation makes it feasible at all (might have issues at work, etc).
So, you cram things in. Sitting at a desk for fifteen? Keep your legs moving. Reading files, you can do so while finding some kind of activity that fits how you’re reading. Laptop on your knees, maybe you do some curls. Have a tablet you can use, or paper files, do some pushups while you read.
If you’re going to have only one single session, make it cardio. Nothing else gives the same time/benefit ratio, and you can do different cardio depending on where you are. So, you might only have an hour, use it running since you don’t need a specific gym or piece of gear.
Gotta work with what you’ve got
I can barely manage anything that takes longer than cooking a decent meal.
Yeah, 3 hours.
There’s a reason I need the gym
I mean, there’s plenty of good meals that only take a half hour to an hour. I’d go as far as to say that if you include stuff where a pot is just simmering and you’re waiting, there’s a ton of options.
Depends on how fast prep is, I guess. I’m used to just zipping through prep since it’s something I’ve done since I was a kid.
Take something like beef stew. That’s twenty minutes of actual cooking, ten of prep, and a bunch of patience.
There’s complicated dishes that take more attention as it cooks, along with a lot of fiddly prep, like beef wellington, where you’re right on top of it the entire time.
I guess it also depends in what the standard of “decent” is lol. Spaghetti can take fifteen minutes start to finish, or it can take a couple of hours including simmer time for the sauce.
