How Do I Make My Gym Sessions More Time-Efficient?

Because who wants to spend hours exercising, especially in the summer?! Probably not you!

With this in mind, here are 3 simple tips to help you get in & out of the gym in no time, whilst still making sure your sessions are effective as possible!

1) Time your rest periods

An obvious one to begin with...time your rest periods & more importantly, stick to them! You'd be surprised how this will help you cut off any unnecessary time-wasting in your sessions.

How long should you be resting in between sets? A goood rule of thumb is 30-60 seconds for a set with 12-20 reps, 1-2 minutes for 6-12 reps & 2-4 minutes for 3-6 reps.

2) Prioritise supersets, giant sets & circuits

If you're short on time in the gym, training systems like supersets, giant sets, drop sets & circuits are your friend! Why? Put simply: they allow you to increase the intensity of your sessions and perform more work in less time.

There are plenty of variations of training systems for you to pick from, however a good place to start is pairing two exercises of opposing muscle groups together in a superset (so with no rest in between). For example, for your upper body, you could perform 10 bench presses straight into 10 bent over rows. Rest your prescribed amount of time and then repeat this 3-4 times. Another good pairing, this time for your lower body could be leg extensions & hamstring curls.

Give these a go & see how you get on!

3) Make your sessions full body

Now this final point is more focused around your overall gym schedule as opposed to any specific session...

If in the summer you find that life gets in the way of your planned trips to the gym and more often than not, 4 gym sessions a week turns into 2...then performing a 3 day body part split such as a push, pull, legs is unlikely to be the best choice for you. If this is sounds like you then ditch the push-pull-legs (at least for the summer) and focus on full-body sessions instead!

How would this work?

So rather than having one session dedicated to purely pushing exercises, one to purely pulling exercises and a session for lower body exercises, instead, you'll split the same volume across 3 sessions and each session would include exercises for all body parts.

This style of training is great because as stated, you still get the same volume in each week as you would if you were performing a push - pull - legs, but also with the added bonus that if you do end up missing a session, you know that you've already got some volume in from the other sessions.

Give these tips a go this summer!