Better Results With Less Time
Getting a Lean, Muscular, Mobile, and Healthy Body with a Busy Life
The world’s two most valuable commodities: health and time.
Without time, it’s hard to maintain health. Without health, we lose time, and we can’t make the most of the time we do have. It may be the most cruel catch 22 of all.
But with a strategy, we can maximize the small amounts of time we do have and find time that may be eluding us.
Every time we combine elements of fitness, each element suffers. If we combine strength and conditioning together in one session or one exercise, neither the strength or the conditioning is trained as optimally effective as if those things had been trained individually. This is an important thing to remember if you’re an elite athlete, with the entire day to train and recover. But few of us have that luxury. To be a world class bench press competitor, combining your bench press training with metabolic conditioning isn’t the best strategy.
However, we must separate optimal stimulus, from optimized time efficiency. Rarely can we have the best of both. Sometimes we must sacrifice a little effectiveness in order to maximize our time.
Doing bench presses as part of a circuit with other movements will slightly detract from the bench stimulus, but in most cases, for most people (myself included) it’s more than worth it.
To become elite at any one thing we must create imbalance. The world’s best distance runners will likely never be known for excessive upper body strength. And that’s fine. They made a conscious decision to excel in a particular field and achieve great things in a specific fitness category. A bodybuilder will never be an elite sprinter, an elite sprinter will likely never win ultramarathons. And that’s ok.
The very first step in creating a fitness plan that is perfect for you and the time that remains after all of life’s other demands, is to sit down and make a conscious decision about what you want YOUR fitness to look like.
I do this by making a weighted list of all the general fitness categories. Remember, this is your fitness path, it should be unique to you. No one else has the right to dictate to you what your fitness should look like.
When creating a weighted fitness list, I keep three categories top of mind: appearance, performance, and quality of life. There’s a lot of cross-over in these three considerations, but it helps to categorize them. Getting very strong MAY help in appearance, and it MAY help in quality of life, but it DEFINITELY fits squarely in the performance category. A 500lb deadlift is not necessary, or even necessarily beneficial, to enhance either appearance or lifestyle support, but there is no debate that it improves strength performance. Being able to deadlift 300lbs has just as much impact on quality of life as a 500lb deadlift. The same goes for endurance. Being able to run a 7-minute mile will give you the same endurance benefits necessary for optimal quality of life as being able to run a 4-minute mile.