The magic in my infamous 20 minute Sunday morning workout
“Did you even workout?”
That’s what I’m used to hearing from my wife on Sunday mornings around 8:30 am when I walk in the door.
The gym opens at 8 am on Sundays and it’s a 5 minute walk from here.
“Hit it right and it doesn’t take much,” I tell her. “How much do you think it takes?”
While it’s true that I’m notorious for Not Even Lifting, there is a madness in my method.
The Sunday session is meant to be a high-rep low-rest full-body day that I can knock out in a hurry. It’s aimed at cardio effect and glucose burn more than straight muscle-building or strength work. This is timed to stack with certain nutrition effects that I fiddle with.
It isn’t something I recommend across the board. But this speed-demon session gets me thinking about the hows and whys of what I’m up to.
It really doesn’t take that much work to body-sculpt.
Most people do too much work, wasting energy and time on things that don’t matter to their goals of adding muscle and/or reducing body fat.
And they dawdle. Lord do they dawdle.
They dawdle between sets, and then they want to dawdle a whole week before training again.
If I didn’t have other strength goals to work toward, all my sessions would end up like this one.
I’d jiggle the rep ranges and rest intervals, but otherwise?
Knocking out a few sets in the 6-15 range, keeping your rest times tight, hitting your entire body in each session is a winning formula that’s real hard to screw up.
Do that 2-5 days a week and you’re cooking.
You can knock that out in half an hour or less if your gym isn’t an overcrowded nightmare.
Keep focus on the major levers, pull them often, and it don’t take that much to get where you want to be.
This is crucial if you’re entering the not-so-young stage of life.
Me, I don’t care to spend 90 minutes or two hours in the gym like I could 20 years ago. Once the clock edges up to 60 minutes, I’m ready to go. I’ve got other things to do with myself.
Depending on how good you are with your energy and fatigue, you may find that you simply do not have the capacity to handle much more than this.
(Many people aren’t good with this dimension at all, so it’s no surprise that folks in the 35+ age range often find that their “recovery ability” is way down. It isn’t, and this can be changed, but that’s a different discussion.)
Point is, gains don’t take nearly as much time and energy as supplement companies and 21 year old fitbro influencers make you think.
It might make you slap your forehead how little you need to train in one workout as long as you’re hitting the right buttons and hitting them often.
On that note:
If you’re feeling the aches and pains and low-energy effects of being over 40 and you’d like my personal guidance to steer you to the body you want…
I’m opening up a handful of coaching slots for the mid-February intake. If you’re interested, reply and let me know and I’ll send you details.
Email subscribers get first dibs. You can opt in here:
Matt Perryman