Ways you can make resistance training more time efficient

A few ideas on how to get the most bang for your buck time-wise during your lifting sessions:

1. Remove junk volume - you probably don’t need to hit small muscle groups with multiple exercises and sets to yield strength or hypertrophy adaptations. When you may only get to train a couple of hours a week does it really matter which small group of fibres in a muscle group are getting slightly more focus? No, consistently progressing an exercise that targets that muscle group is more important.

2. Use mostly compound movements - these multi-joint exercises recruit more muscle groups, more muscle fibres and use more energy in the same time frame and should be the skeleton of your sessions. Flesh them out with more targeted isolation exercises afterwards.

3. Utilise supersets and complexes - 2 or more exercises sharing a rest means you can pack more exercises into your session. This can be very effective when different areas of the body are used in each exercise to limit the fatigue of one exercise on the other.

4. Incorporate mobility exercises between sets - 2-3 minute rests are going to be needed between sets of exercises. Mobility drills aren’t particularly fatiguing, so rather than doing nothing, or scrolling on your phone, mobility drills can be incorporated during inter-set rest. More mobility means lower injury risk and over time potentially greater range of motion for some of your exercises meaning getting more out of every rep. Instead of struggling to find a time for your mobility or motivating yourself to do so independently, incorporating it into your strength session can make it easier to stay consistent.