3 Important Lessons I Learned Cutting My Workout Time in Half
By: Josef Cruz
Tags: Exercise, Fitness, Running, Workout, Health

3 Important Lessons I Learned Cutting My Workout Time in Half

Photo by Diego Lozano on Unsplash

I’ll be the first to say it: I’m a fitness nut. I spent roughly an hour at the gym every day, and then another hour reading and learning about fitness and health.

But then the Pandemic happened, and I suddenly lost the freedom of going to the gym every day. After a few months, they started to reopen again, but I can’t stay my usual workout hours because of social distancing, and there are also in line waiting for their turn.

So I cut it down to what I thought was the bare minimum: 30 minutes, three to four times a week. I knew I was making a sacrifice, and I was prepared to face the consequences. I was sure I’d see a huge drop in performance and strength within a few weeks.

I was waiting for that moment where it would become clear that I couldn’t lift as much or run as fast as I used to.

The only problem was; that moment never came.

Instead of the degradation I was expecting to see, I was actually getting stronger! I noticed how I could lift more, run faster, and do more reps of just about every exercise!

And now, a few weeks later, I did a fitness test to analyze the results of my new training routine. Here’s a quick excerpt of my results:

The maximum amount of pullups: 35 (1st quarter of 2020–20)

The maximum amount of pushups: 108 (1st quarter of 2020 ~70)

Fastest time on 10 km (~6.2 miles): 38 minutes (1st quarter of 2020 42 minutes)

Obviously, cutting my training in half was a great decision — but why? How did reducing my time at the gym lead to these results? After analyzing the changes in my training routine, I have extracted three valuable lessons:

1. You adapt to the time you have

The first thing I learned from cutting my training in half is that you adapt to your available time.

If you have unlimited time to do something, you will have no pressure to be effective. If you have 10 hours to finish a project, you’re going to fill out those 10 hours. But if you only get 5 hours to do the same work, you’ll be pressured to be far more productive to produce the same results in half the time.

That’s what happened with my training; since I suddenly only had half of my usual time at my disposal, I was forced to make my workout as effective as possible.

I slimmed it down to only the most essential exercises, cut my resting time between sets in half, and removing any distractions that would drag out the time between exercises.

Through all these changes, I managed to make my workouts more effective than they had ever been and produce much better results in half the time.

2. It’s about quality, not quantity

The more time spent at the gym does not equal better or faster results. Just because you do more exercise and train for longer periods of time doesn’t mean you’ll get any stronger any faster. It’s about training right, not training more!

When I cut my training in half, I learned that a lot of what I was doing contributed very little to my overall results. Some of my training was even reducing my results!

For instance, I used to do many exercises with the same muscle group, thinking that the more I worked it, the stronger it would get. But what I was actually doing was exhausting those muscles with unnecessary exercises so that I was too tired to do the key exercises properly.

I was basically sacrificing my training quality by increasing the quantity, which brings up the last lesson.

3. 80 percent of the results came from 20 percent of the training

Once I cut my training in half, I realized that only about a fifth of my time at the gym was producing 80% of my results. It was a small number of key exercises that resulted in most of my strength gain, while the rest were basically inefficient time wasters.

This is what is known as the Pareto principle — that a majority of your results stem from a small portion of your efforts.

Once I realized this, I cut my training down to those basic 20 percent and expanded them. This was the key to maximizing my gains while minimizing the effort; by identifying the time-wasters and cutting them out, I reduced my total amount of training and focused on expanding the 20 percent that stood for most of my results.

By implementing these three lessons, I successfully cut my training in half while suffering no negative effects on my results. And as a fitness nut, this meant that I had just made a huge part of my life much more effective!