To make fitness livable long term, we have to balance consistency with a dose of reality, making sure it works into a manageable lifestyle. I tell people constantly there are 168 hours in a week, and if you can give yourself—and me or one of our trainers—3 or 4 of those, we can get you in the best shape of your life, and show you how to keep you there as well.
BUT…what you do with those 3-4 hours is critical. A lot of people don’t realize that a great way to work your cardiovascular system while also working your body aerobically to get the same benefit of doing your traditional long sustained cardio comes down to a very critical & simple technique.
Shorten your rest time in-between sets.
Let’s say you’re doing your traditional bench press; 5 sets with 200 pounds. You would normally rest 2 minutes in between sets.
Drop that rest time to 20-30 seconds.
This will do a number of things to your body. It will overload the aerobic system. Your breathing and heart rate will go up. Circulation will also increase. It will minimize your strength level, and you will find out by the third or fourth set that you will not be able to lift quite as much weight. But the benefit of this is that you are still overloading the muscle, you are still breaking it down, and you are getting your aerobic benefit the exact same time you are doing your resistance workout, so you don’t have to waste 20 minutes later doing the cardio workout.
Better workout, less time…and more time to live the life you’re working out to enjoy!
on August 22, 2010, 9:27 pm
Rick said:
Remember as times decrease…loads decrease and are not sufficient enough to create a metabolic stimulus for protein synthesis.ATP must be recovered which may take 2-3 minutes to overload the muscles.