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As much as you all love spending hours in the gym, I have some bad news for you.  Your workouts are too long, inefficient, and frankly they’re just plain boring.  Here are 3 tips you can use to trim that workout down into an efficient, productive and time-saving routine.

1.  Use Full Bodied Workouts

Let’s face it, most of you reading this are computer geeks.  Not bodybuilders.  So what makes you think you can achieve the results you want by following a bodybuilder’s routine?  I have news for you.  Those bodybuilders didn’t achieve that physique because they had a great routine.  If I had to guess I’d say they had a little help in the way of chemicals and genetics.

The body recovers from a workout much faster than you may think.  The need for splitting up muscle groups into different days is just an old myth.  In fact it slows your progress down because you are only hitting certain muscles once a week.  Keep the workouts short and efficient by picking fewer exercises that hit more muscles.  For example; squats over leg curls or push ups over triceps extensions.

2.  Train movement patterns not muscle groups

As evolved as you may think you are, your body is primitively designed.  In other words, your body doesn’t know what muscles do what.  It just knows how to get from point A to point B.  Your biceps will contract just the same doing a pull-up as they will doing a dumbbell curl.  Cut your time in the gym down considerably by eliminating all of the “isolation movements”.  Don’t take my word for it.  Take a look at any competitive gymnast. Their entire training revolves around complex body weight movements.  They don’t have time to waste doing leg extensions and biceps curls.

3.  Take advantage of super sets, triple sets, and circuits

Another way to cut your time in the gym down considerably is to limit your rest periods between sets.  This can be done by training non opposing movement patterns back to back like squats and pushups.  While working one group of muscles the other is recovering.  There really is no limit to the number of exercises you can string back to back.  More than three and you have yourself a circuit.  Not only does this method save you some time, it also makes the workout more cardiovascular in nature which doesn’t hurt when you’re trying to lose a couple lbs of body fat.

Why spend an hour in the gym when the same results or better can be achieved in half the time?  Use the methods I described above to hack some unnecessary minutes from your gym life and free up some guilt free time to do whatever you like.

Jamie Nischan owns and runs a successful fitness coaching business in Stamford CT. Through the use of posture correction and exercise he treats pain often associated with excessive use of computers. More about Jamie can be found at www.thebuffgeek.com.

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