Honestly I think this is one of the hardest things to juggle.
Life is already hectic. A lot of us have regular work, family and sporting commitments – not to mention the in between stuff and the random flying objects life throws in our direction
So it’s not surprising that so many people struggle to comprehend how they will fit exercise into their schedule.
And it’s even scarier when we watch social media influencers telling us they train for an hour or more per day
No wonder so many people think changing their body shape and fitting in exercise is simply unattainable with their busy lives
But what if you didn’t need an hour or more a day for exercise?
What if there was a different way to approach exercise?
Lets start of by being clear; when I say exercise I don’t mean a walk. I’m referring to cardio and weights sessions
When you enter the gym or your training area your focus should be on intensity. Giving the session everything you have while you are in there. You want to get as much “bang for your buck” as you can in as short a time as possible ; because remember we are all busy.
Lets talk cardio first. Any cardio sessions should be short, sharp and sweet. 20-30mins of heart pumping sweaty effort. At about the 10 min mark you should be looking for a way to get out of the session. That’s the effort we are talking about.

See the desired effect everyone is exercising for – that change in body composition – that doesn’t actually happen in the session. There’s a little sciency thing called Excessive Post Oxygen Consumption. Basically, if you can spare 20-30 mins 2 x week, your body will need to work really hard to recover from that session. Recovery requires energy; energy means calories burnt. And if you don’t sit back and eat a heap of crappy food, you can potentially be in recovery mode and burning calories for up to 48hours after that session. No need for hours and hours of cardio.
The same principle applies to weights training. Keep it focused and intense.
Intense doesn’t mean completing drop sets and supersets and giant sets all the way through your session. Sure these things can be used at times but are not necessary to change your body composition.
Changing your body shape/composition comes down to building muscle and burning body fat. To build muscle the muscles must be forced to adapt to a new stimulus.
That stimulus is heavier weight.
Focusing on the big moves and lifting heavy weight will force your muscles to adapt/grow. But again, just as with cardio – the workout is only a stimulus. The adaption happens in the recover stage and your body has to work hard to recover; meaning it burns calories to recover.
In reality your weight session only needs to be 45-60mins long at the most. And for the majority of people 2-3 weights sessions per week is ample.

Now before you go getting excited looking for loop holes and thinking “what if I do it every day then my body has to recover harder??” it doesn’t quite work like that.
Training every day, especially if you don’t eat enough of the right foods can lead to your body becoming inflamed, raising cortisol levels and result in retained body fat. Not what you want. Rest and recovery are important.
So lets think about everything that I’ve said above for a second and crunch some numbers.
If you only need to do 2 x 20min intense cardio sessions a week, and you only need to do 2 x 45-60min weight sessions per week; that’s a grand total of 2hours and 40mins of exercise in a week.
That’s less than 2% of you entire week
Still don’t think you have the time?
Grab your phone for a second and open up Facebook. Now click on the 3 bars at the top right of the screen. Scroll down and select settings and privacy. Then select your time of Facebook….
Still don’t think you have the time?
The truth of the situation is, up until now you probably didn’t realise how little amount of exercise time a week, it was really going to take to change your body