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Something is always better than nothing.
Something is ALWAYS better than nothing and this is never truer than with exercise.
Lack of time isn’t holding you back…
What is actually holding you back is the notion that you need to spend hours in the gym.
What is holding you back is your perfectionist tendencies and assumption that if you can’t do something perfectly there is no point doing it at all.
And, to put it bluntly… you’re wrong.
Want to get results with minimal time commitment?
I have women getting fantastic results from 15min home workouts 3x a week.
Something I have noticed this year (2020) is that consistently doing relatively little will get you pretty far.
In fact, I got in pretty decent shape doing daily 15 min body weight workouts (okay sometimes I used a band) towards the end of lockdown when motivation for anything more than that was pretty low. My point here being that even with training experience you can gain a lot from actually doing very little.
Think about exercise as a stimulus. Exercise puts a stress on the body which the body then adapts to. That way the next time your body is under that stress it is better able to cope with it. This is essentially how exercise and fitness works.
Stress >> adapt.
The interesting part is that depending on your goals the length of that stress (how long you exercise) is of less importance than we are often lead to believe.
Examples from research:
The increase in VO2 max from high intensity interval training was not reduced with fewer sprint repetitions. Even when sprint time was reduced from 20s to 10s (Nalcakan et al, 2018) 1 set to failure with >80% 1 rep max was as good as 3 sets for increase strength (Cameron et al., 2012).
Essentially what is happening here is that you have saturated the response. It’s like watching people continuously press the button when waiting to cross the road.. it’s not going to make the lights turn green any faster hun. You’ve saturated the response.
You don’t need a lot of time to get the benefits of exercise. The idea that if you’re not spending at least an hour exercising then there is no point is just plain wrong. If you have a spare 10mins you can do an effective workout which is a million miles better than doing nothing because you can’t do it perfectly. IMPERFECT ACTION.
I’ve attached a photo of my favourite graph of all time showing the HUGE health benefit to the first hour of exercise you do per week.
If you want some help with this I have created some short, sharp workouts for you here. One is home, one is gym.
Let me know how you get on!
