I don’t have too much spare time, but I really intend to get into shape, especially ahead of the December holidays. How much time should one be spending in the gym?
Regular readers will know that there is a personal training facility on my property. My wife wakes up at 4am and, because I share a bed with her, I do too. I go back to sleep most days, but when I wake up again, she is well into training her first client of the day.
Both my sons have developed quite the taste for gym. I have no idea why. The older one trains at university and the younger one has been trying to match my training times at home. Unfortunately, the “open times” in the facility at home are usually during school hours or late in the evening, so I have had to sign him up to a commercial gym so he can train with the other cool kids from school.
While the new gym was doing his biometrics on the day we signed him up, I stood and watched the members wasting time and doing nothing while believing they were exercising. I had forgotten how silly the whole commercial gym vibe is. Please, don’t interpret this as a dig at the gym companies; it isn’t. There’s just nothing they can do about it. Their commercial model is built on sales of new memberships and, despite offering incredible facilities, they cannot physically train every person unless those people pay personal trainers extra money.
In about 25 minutes I saw nothing. Chatter, laughter, incredibly low-intensity machine work and a few Gen Z boys walking up and down in front of the mirror like a bunch of peacocks competing against their own reflection.
My best sessions with heavy free weights, medicine balls, suspension training straps and bands usually last just less than 40 minutes. There are days I am done within half an hour. The key, though, is what you intend to gain from the gym. I love high-intensity training. I don’t just mean high-intensity interval training (HIIT). I mean strict rest periods — on the shorter end of the spectrum — and a stacked programme of getting through exercises, giving everything possible, without the distraction of socialising and checking social media.
Let’s answer your question. Investing in your health and well-being, or even your beach body, is not something that is achieved in “spare time”. You need to dedicate time. Carve out time in your diary and be intentional — you check the headlines or scroll Instagram reels in “spare time”; you certainly don’t squat, lunge or press, often within a rep of failure, in your spare time.
Depending on your goals and fitness level, the sweet spot will always be between 30 minutes and an hour. That’s not what you will read online. The internet will talk about 45 minutes and two hours. Unless you are a professional athlete or an enhanced weekend warrior, two hours is ridiculous, and you will end up hurting yourself.
High-intensity sessions such as metabolic conditioning or other circuit training can be completed in half an hour, including a five-minute warm-up and cool-down. You won’t always train in this zone — you should have a rounded programme with strength training too. Forty-five minutes, without distractions, is plenty to get through a well-programmed push-pull-legs or upper-lower split.
I stopped doing body-part splits when Brad Pitt stopped flexing in movies. There are people who spend an hour doing chest or arms — never legs — but do yourself a favour and analyse the efficiency of their sessions. Unless they are competitive bodybuilders (putting in huge volume) you are likely to find that 30 minutes is spent on chatting, hogging pieces of equipment, asking “are you done with this bench?” and scrolling social media, while the actual workout takes 30 minutes or less.
Without the appropriate level of intensity (taking into account your age and fitness level), you’re just going through the motions.
“Pencil in” an hour. Commit to training with the right intensity or working with a qualified trainer. This should comfortably cover your greetings, mirror glances, catch-ups, warm-ups, cool-downs and toilet breaks. Unless you’re a competitive athlete, any more likely means you’re wasting time.
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