When it comes to working out, one question that’s often hard to answer yet very important to address is how long should you spend in the gym every day? There are lots of factors that determine how much time we should spend working out, but at the same time there are many other factors that limit how much time we’re able to work out. Finding a way to balance these competing forces is something that many people struggle with, so it’s definitely a crucial topic to address.
Anything Is Better than Nothing
First and foremost, the most important thing to understand is that any activity is better than no activity. If you’re someone who just wants to improve your general fitness and health without necessarily trying to build a lot of muscle, simply making a conscious effort to be more active can go a long way.
It doesn’t have to be a lot by any means. For adults, the typical recommendation is at least 150 minutes of moderately intense activity per week. That’s only 30 minutes a day if you exercise five days a week, or only about 20 minutes if you exercise every day, which certainly isn’t that difficult to achieve.
That being said, if you do have more ambitious goals of building muscle and strength, meeting just this bare minimum probably won’t be sufficient. It’s OK to start here when you’re new to the gym and are still figuring out how to integrate it into your daily routine, but as you gain experience, you should expect to allocate more time to your training.
Quality Over Quantity
The problem is that in most cases, it’s hard to incorporate enough training volume, or total work performed, into 20-30 minutes of training to actually build muscle. This leads me to the key point that instead of focusing on how much time you’re spending at the gym, your focus should be on how much work you’re doing when you’re there.
Time isn’t what drives muscle growth. If you can optimize your workouts and get it all done in 30-45 minutes, that’s going to be a lot better than spending two unproductive hours at the gym. So instead of allotting yourself arbitrary amounts of time for exercise every day, let’s start by figuring out what you should be accomplishing during each workout.
For any given muscle group, perform 3-4 exercises for that muscle group, doing 2-3 working sets of each exercise, excluding sets for warming up and cooling down. In addition, aim to train each muscle group twice a week. This will help you reach 10-25 total working sets per week, which is generally recommended for building muscle size and strength.
So, how long should your workouts be? Well, however long it takes you to get through all that, because the reality is that the effectiveness of a workout can’t be measured in minutes.
Saving Time at the Gym
That being said, this doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to shorten your training sessions while still having a thorough workout. If you find yourself constantly being limited by time, there are several things you can try.
First, incorporate more compound movements into your training. These are exercises that work multiple muscle groups simultaneously, and not only are they great for building strength, they can also help you train more efficiently. If you’re adhering to the recommendation of at least three exercises per muscle group, a single compound exercise could qualify as an exercise for each of the main muscle groups that it recruits, which would reduce the total number of exercises you’d need to perform.
For example, bench pressing heavily targets the chest and triceps, so this one movement could count as an exercise for both of these muscle groups. In theory, you could adequately train several muscle groups with just a few compound exercises, but isolation exercises also provide many crucial benefits, so I wouldn’t totally cut them out of your routine unless you’re really short on time.
Another option is to perform supersets with opposing muscle groups. Instead of doing one exercise at a time and resting after every set, you can continuously alternate between exercises that work separate, unrelated muscle groups. This reduces the duration of your workout by minimizing the amount of time you need to rest between exercises. For example, you can do a chest exercise, then immediately go into a back exercise while you let your chest rest, and vice versa. This can essentially cut your workout time in half.
These are a few very effective methods for speeding up your routine, but there are also plenty of others that I discuss in a separate post on ways to save time in the gym.
Make Sure You’re Addressing the Real Issue
While incorporating enough volume into your training means that at a minimum, you’ll likely need more than 20-30 minutes, it’s hard to determine a maximum amount of time because it all depends on how efficient you can be. Therefore, if you’re trying to implement a workout routine into a busy schedule, instead of thinking about being in the gym for a certain amount of time, think about how you can complete the necessary amount of work as efficiently as you can.
To do this, not only do you have the aforementioned time-saving tools at your disposal, but everything from how you split up your workouts to the exercises you choose and the order in which you perform them can be optimized to further streamline your routine.
