If you want to feel more alert, focused, and energized, exercise is a magic bullet.
When you do it regularly, it can increase feel- good neurotransmitters while shrinking the anxiety-related and growing the focus-related areas of your brain.
Exercises supercharges your health and it never hurts to be proud of how your butt and biceps look.
Regardless of how great exercise is though, you shouldn’t waste your time doing it.
I mean, do exercise, but considering your crazy schedule, don’t waste time while you’re doing it.
If you’ve designated an hour in your schedule to exercise, that 60 minutes should include your shower.
An hour with a shower.
If you’re a triathlete, marathon runner, or other athletic hobbyists that has made the decision to train for a competitive event, the rule doesn’t apply to you.
(Of course, you’re probably not claiming you don’t have enough time to exercise.)
If your “competitive event” involves the challenges of daily life however, time can be a consistent barrier to exercise.
According to the American Medical Association, you only need a little over 20 minutes of relatively challenging exercise per day to create energized, disease resistant, fully functioning cells in your body and brain.
(“Relatively challenging” would suggest that you could talk if you needed to while exercising, but you don’t really want to.)
If you want to take that a step further and create a brain, butt, and biceps that are “ahead of the curve” shoot for another 20 minutes more days of the week than you don’t.
Even at 40 minutes of exercise 3-4 days of the week, this still gives you 20 minutes within the hour to transport to and from the gym or shower up move on.
To make an “an hour with a shower” work for you, here’s the research-backed strategies for cardiovascular and resistance training that have helped my clients get more results in less time.
Your body, brain, and Outlook calendar will thank you.
Cardiovascular Training Time-Savers
Exercise that gets your heart pumping hard is a magic bullet for your body and brain health. Here’s how to get the most out of the least amount of exercise time.
High intensity interval training 1-2 times per week (20-30 minutes):
Interval training involves pairing hard bursts of exercise with short recovery bouts. For example, 60 seconds of running/walking hard followed by 60 seconds of jogging/walking easy. Repeat 10 times. Add a five-minute warm up and cool down on each end and in 30 minutes you’ve created a better body and brain.
If you truly pushed yourself, your 20 minutes of intervals may have created the same impact to your heart, lungs, and metabolism as nearly double that time spent doing a sustained low intensity activity.
This type of high/low intensity training can be done with any type of movement and with any type of cardiovascular exercise equipment. Hills, stairs, and other environmental challenges offer great outdoor opportunities for high intensity interval training.
Doing high intensity interval training every day leads to diminishing returns eventually, so stick to a 1-2 days per week and do it well.
Circuit training 2-3 times per week (25-30 minutes)
Circuit training is a way to combine resistance (more lean muscle, stronger bones, look better naked) and cardiovascular (the magic bullet for body and brain health) training into a short efficient workout.
Create a 12-exercise circuit alternating between resistance training exercises (push-ups, squats, etc.) and aerobic calisthenics (jumping jacks, burpees, etc.). Do each exercise for 30 seconds with only about 5 seconds of rest in between.
I was excited to be able to help a LOT of people get moving with this type of exercise through my help with the literature behind the 7 Minute Workout and my subsequent Amazon best-seller, 7 Minutes to Fit.
Here’s a short example to try:
30 seconds each, 5 seconds in between
Rest 60 seconds after first round
4 total rounds (About 30 total minutes)
Squats
Jumping Jacks
Push ups
Run in place
Walking lunges
Shadow boxing
Dips
Skier jump side to side
Plank
Jump rope skips
Narrow push ups
Mountain climbers
This type of training has long term limitations if you have specific results in mind, but it’s one of the most efficient ways to begin to get exercise into your busy schedule.
It’s also a great way to exercise when you don’t have access to much space or equipment.
Accumulation
One of the radical strategies I’ve helped my busiest leaders use to sneak exercise in under their “availability of time” wire is through exercise accumulation.
Research has shown that even by accumulating 20+ minutes a day of broken-up, relatively challenging bouts of physical activity, you can get benefits within range of doing it all at once.
This isn’t my “go-to” because it’s hard to track and consistency becomes a challenge. The idea of accumulation sends training purists into a tizzy, but I’m married to results vs. dogma.
I’ve seen improved bloodwork, bodyweight, and overall vitality from clients who commit to accumulating 20-30 minutes of challenging exercise throughout the day, more days of the week than they don’t.
In these cases, we work together to define some specific daily routines, like parking as far away from the office as possible and fast walking/running to and from. We can usually find enough opportunities within a daily routine to accumulate a result.
This also ensures more activity breaks throughout the day. Even if you consolidate your exercise, research has shown it’s important to get up and move every few hours to energize your brain and body.
We use accumulation as a strategy most often when clients are traveling or in industries like investment banking where “fire drills” (all-nighters) are common.
Stay tuned for Part II where I’ll share how to get the most out of “an hour with a shower” of resistance training.
