The Surprise 20 Minute Workout…
So it’s Friday evening, and I’m stoked. I’ve got the top down on the car, the tunes cranked, a shaker cup with a scoop each of H+Blocker and CE-XL in my hand, and I’m off to the gym for a chest workout. I’m looking forward to a good solid hour of hammering my chest in relative solitude (it’s always dead on Friday nights… most people have a life of some sort… lol).
As I drive along, singing along off-key with Airborne’s Running Wild, I suddenly got a bit of a nasty feeling. See, I’ve only recently started working out at this gym, and I’m not that familiar with their hours. Didn’t they recently start closing earlier on Fridays? Ugh. Suddenly, I’m not feeling so chipper anymore.
To make a longish story short, instead of having a an hour plus to work out, I walked into the weight room with just under 20 minutes ’til closing time. Now here’s the thing; for me, weight training is about many things, two of which are stress relief and an endorphin rush. If I don’t get my session with the weights, well… let’s just say I’m not the greatest company. And with no workout possible again until Monday, not working out was simply not an option.
But how to get a decent chest workout in 20 minutes?
Here’s what I did…
1) Drastically reduce my warm-up routine.
2) Drastically reduce rest times between sets: Normally, I lift fairly heavy — which means I need to rest between 2-3 minutes between sets on order to recover fully for the next set. For this workout, rest would be limited to 60 seconds.
3) Reduce the weight: Without proper recovery time, there’s no way I’m going to be able to lift the usual weight, and certainly nowhere near the number of reps.
4) Superset: “Stack” several exercises together (bench press and incline dumbbell presses).
So how’d it go?
To be fair, I actually went 5 minutes over my time limit, thanks to a sympathetic employee. But I left, soaked with sweat, pumped, and somewhat appeased. No here’s the good part… today, I have MAJOR soreness. That’s a rarity itself for me.
OK, if you’re wondering… “Paul, what the heck is the point of this post?”, let me tell you…
Even if you have only a very limited time, you can still make the most of it in the gym, provided you wring the most out of every moment. And sometimes, having less time (rather than more) is a good thing — you simply have to work extremely, extremely hard to get anywhere near what you wanted to get done.
My old boss used to say this about project deadlines, “the time it takes to complete a project expands according to the size of the deadline alloted to it.” In other words, if you have 90 minutes to complete your workout, chances are you’ll chat with the cute girl (or guy) on the treadmill, socialize with your buddies (or girlfriends) and waste time so that your workout takes 90 minutes. If you arrive late and only have 40 minutes to complete your workout, you have no choice but to be a heckuva lot more focused at the job at hand (20 minutes is just a mite too little time, in my opinion).
Give it a try… arrive late. Try the “surprise” workout. And see how sore you are the next day!
