The Best Workout Plan For Busy People

I’m going to keep this intro short and sweet because, if you’re reading this, you’re probably busy!

In this article, you’re going to learn the methods behind making your workouts short, yet extremely effective.

We all go through periods of our life where your workouts might need to take a backseat. Whether you just had a baby, you’re building a business, or you just started a new job, these methods will allow you to keep working out without losing progress.

At the end of the article, I’ll tie everything together with the best workout plan for busy people that you can tweak to make work for you.

Sound good?

Let’s get into it.

Compound exercises

When you’re short on time, prioritizing exercises that use multiple joints and muscle groups is going to give you the most bang for your buck.

Exercises like squats, deadlifts, rows and bench presses are going to be a staple in the best workout plan for busy people. These are going to allow you to lift heavy and train a lot of muscle groups at once, which will save you time.

While there’s nothing wrong with isolation exercises that only work one joint or muscle, you want to focus on compound exercises if you’re short on time.

You’ll be able to hit muscles you typically isolate like your biceps, triceps, shoulders and hamstrings by doing compound exercises.

Supersets

A superset is where you pair exercises together that use opposite muscle groups.

Here’s an example:

1A) Dumbbell bench press

3 sets of 10 reps

1B) Dumbbell single arm row

3 sets of 8 reps each arm

*Rest 2 minutes between sets

A dumbbell bench press trains your chest, shoulder, and tricep muscles. The dumbbell row works your back and bicep muscles.

While one muscle group is working, the other muscle group is resting.

By pairing them together, you’re going to save time by cutting your rest periods down. Your total rest time for 3 sets of dumbbell bench and dumbbell rows is 6 minutes.

If you did both exercises on their own without pairing them together, your rest times would double to 12 minutes.

Strategically pairing exercises together can help you save a ton of time, and are going to be a staple in the best workout plan for busy people.

EDT circuits

Escalating density training, or EDT, is a way to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.

Instead of performing traditional sets and reps of an exercise, you’re going to pick two exercises and perform them back-to-back for a set amount of time.⁣ Tally up how many reps of each exercise you can get in that time frame and try to beat it each week.⁣

Start with 10-15 minute blocks of time. You can increase the time up to 20 minutes, but going much longer than that is going to kind of defeat the time saving benefits..

You want to pick exercises that work opposing muscles, like push-ups and pull-ups, or goblet squats and romanian deadlifts.⁣

Make sure you don’t go to complete failure on either exercise. You want to leave a few reps in the tank on each set. ⁣

It’s normal for your reps to drop as you go. In fact, if your reps are not dropping, you need to push a little harder 😉⁣

If you pick exercises with weights, you want to use something that you could do for around 10 reps. You’re not going to do 10 reps though.. start with around 4-6 reps and let the reps drop off as you start to fatigue.

How many total reps should you aim for?

It’s going to depend on the exercises you pick. If you’re doing bodyweight exercises, you’ll probably be able to do more reps on each set. If you’re doing exercises that use weight, you’ll end up doing less total reps.

The important thing is that you’re trying to do as much work in the shortest amount of time possible.

Total rep sets

Another way to save time is by doing total rep sets.

You’re going to pick a total number of reps and try to get there in as few sets as possible.

Rest as long as you need to between each set, but try to keep moving as fast as you can.

This can be done with exercises with weight, or bodyweight exercises like push-ups, chin-ups or walking lunges.

The Best Workout Plan For Busy People

Without any further ado, here is the program!

This is something I wrote for a client and friend of mine who is a dentist.

He was training for dental board exams at the time, and had very little time to workout throughout the week. He had about 30 minutes 3 days per week, and he could occasionally sneak in some extra workouts if they could be done at home.

You can tweak this program to work for you.

If you only have 3 days per week, just do the first 3 workouts. The workouts should only take 30 minutes each, tops.

There are 2 optional workouts that should only take about 10-15 minutes each. You can do these workouts from home with just a few resistance bands and your bodyweight.

They can also be stacked together. For example, you can do the arms and the lower body extra workouts in the same day if you want to. Or, you can throw the arms workout at the end of the upper body workout, and the lunge workout at the end of your lower body day if you have extra time.

If you can’t get to the optional workouts, don’t sweat it. They are just there if you can get the extra work in.