Stuck for time? Part 2

In my last post I wrote down a few of my favourite workouts to do when I am pushed for time. The workouts usually take me around 10 mins to complete.

It seems that quite a few people liked the workouts and so I decided to share a few more ideas with you.

No Weights? No Problem!

If you're away from home, say on a holiday or staying in a hotel over night and feeling restless or missing your workout; the one thing people think is that because they don't have any weights they can't get in a good workout.

Well no fear! Not only will this help you get a good workout, it can be done in less than 10 minutes too! I've outlined two variations below which were inspired from some Turbulence Training workouts:

Workout A

A1) Decline press ups - 3 sets of 10, superset with
A2) Bodyweight squats or Y squats - 3 sets of 10

B1) Spiderman press ups - 3 sets of 10, superset with
B2) Step ups - 3 sets of 10 reps each leg

Why 3 sets of 10? No real reason, I just find that doing the above in that rep range takes just under 10 minutes.

Workout B

This involves exactly the same exercises as above but the parameters and challenge is different

A1) Decline press ups - 10 reps
A2) Bodyweight squats or Y squats - 10 reps
A3) Spiderman press ups - 10 reps
A4) Step ups - 10 reps each leg

So one giant set - now repeat as many times as you can in 10 minutes.

If you find this getting easy, swap the bodyweight squats for bulgarian split squats with back leg raised for 10 reps each leg

EDT Variations

I can only wish to have come up with the Escalating Density Training concept, that was left to Charles Staley and is one of my favourite systems for fat loss. It's an incredibly simple system - pick two exercises and do as many reps of each as you can in a set time frame. As the theme of this post is 10 minutes, we need to look at some bang for the buck exercises. Some variations of the top of my mind are:

1) Squat thrusts
2) Shoulder presses

1) Bulgarian split squats
2) Press ups

1) Lunges
2) Pull ups

So the idea is perform the exercises back to back for 10 minutes solid. So taking the first one, it might look

5 squat thrusts then 5 shoulder presses, then 5 squat thrusts then 5 shoulder presses, etc. Then as you start to get tired it may drop to sets of 4, then 3 then 2 then singles.

10 Minutes of torture

I have used this before and then reread about it as part of a workout in an article by Alwyn Cosgrove and Chad Waterbury. In their article, part of the workout consisted of doing kettle bell swings for 10 minutes and seeing how many you could do.

You could apply this to any number of exercises / exercise combos. Similar to the EDT but this time you're only really focusing on one exercise / combo. For example

kettlebell / dumbbell swings
squat thrusts with shoulder press
squat down, squat thrust, squat up, chin up
lunges with shoulder press
sandbag clean and jerks

As you can see there are quite a few ideas you could use!

Try them out, take inspiration from them and come up with your own ideas! The main point of this is that you can get a good workout done in 10 minutes if you are pushed for time.

As ever, I would love to hear about any ideas you have for quick workouts. Drop me a line!