I'm not sure who I'm writing this to - the tens of thousands of people who train consistently and waste over half to two-thirds of their time when using a training facility or the the tens of thousands who have yet to darken the doors of a facility. Let's go with the future exercisers first since they haven't already convinced themselves they know what they're doing and I know how menacing the gym environment can seem in the begining so I'lll help them cut through all the misinformation they are surely reading and listening to.
You've been lied to. Quite a bit actually, so let's be clear. You do not have to exercise yourself into a sweaty mess on the floor an hour a day, six days a week, to lose weight, get stronger, look better, sleep better, feel better and cut your risks to all cause mortality due to lifestyle factors. You do NOT. Anyone that tells you differently either does not know what they're talking about or they're trying to sell you something (a membership to something, a product or service, etc.). Let me be redundantly clear - it is physiologically untrue. For everyone. Always.
"How can this be true?," you ask. "I hear just the opposite all the time, from friends, on the Internet." Well-meaning people tend to forget where they started - at sedentary - and how they felt. They forgot the inability to do much at all when they first began, the nausea and how acutely sore they were for days after because they reached way too far. They forget how many weeks of that they endured until their physiology finally caught up, weeks if not months later. Why did they suffer throught that? I have no idea. They more than likely had a friend or two in the mix good-naturedly prodding them and they were all, almost asuredly, part of a culture of others going right along with them, leaders pushing the process, selling a dream.
Then people got discouraged. Then people got hurt. And those people never came back. Ever. Who would?
It doesn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that way. As in all things, you have to seek out and listen to the right people and sometimes they are not that easy to find. And let's face facts, finding truth these days is fleeting at best, is it not?
All of us are where we are and we will start right there. Wishing otherwise is simply silliness. You are a grand experiment of one who just happens to be you. Own that, it's ok. Being honest with yourself is the only place to begin the journey to a better you. Perfection is not the goal, getting better every week IS the goal. We talk about "winning the week" often. You have to know how to set that week up for success, program it, own it. Your personal success. This is about YOU. Learn to be ok with being selfish about it.
You need to work with someone who can help you define and understand these things and help you program a sane process that nudges you in the right direction for a few weeks, teaches you correct exercise form, explains in some detail the myriad physiological processes that are being stimulated and fatigued and how they will recover and adapt, over time, day by day. Most people will have areas of concern that need to be addressed - joint pain, past surgeries, metabolic abnormalities, high blood pressure, asthma, etc. and some are simply in a higher risk category intially because of age, gender and family health history. If you find the right person you will start out where you are, reaching just a bit farther each day towards where you want to go, week by week. You will add volume of work and intensity of effort as you go and if you stay on the train you will eventually arrive at the station. If you stay on the train. The right train, with the right conductor.
While you are learning and creating that "week of winning", if you're like most people, having enough time (actually the perception of not having enough time - a subject for a blog down the road) is the number one barrier to exercise. Some of that is internal some of it external, but at the end of the day if you're considering a new path to a better you I doubt you're lazy. Lazy people don't join gyms. Lazy people don't do much of anything worth talking about. And just to be clear, I'm not saying you're lazy if you don't work out at a gym. We've got enough people putting words in other people's mouths these days. Stay out of mine. You are walking around with enough tools (your body) right now to get you way down the path to success. You can consider other options at a later date if you like.
In my humble opinion, you're looking for a 30-40 min workout with elements of cardiovascular, strength and flexibility training and performing those elements, in any infinite number of ways 2-5 days every week. Seems like a big swing, 2-5 days, doesn't it? It's a big swing because in the beginning, 2 days a week may be all you need to get you from sedentary to a million times better and over time you may feel so much better and also enjoy it enough that you train more often. Also, what kind of training you do and how often you do it depends on your specific goals and yours alone. A bit of advice. In all things, don't worry too much if at all about what everyone else is doing. Try it if you haven't. It's quite liberating. Most of them are doing it wrong anyway.
From an efficiency standpoint, inside those workouts, how you program the exercise, how you sequence that exercise in particular, is mission critical. It's so mission critical from an efficiency standpoint that it is rarely considered in programming. Why is that? One of the questions of the ages. I have no idea. It is utterly befuddling. Mostly it's just lack of knowledge, some of it is just laziness.
Now lets bring the folks already training into these considerations.
If you're into strength training at a facility and you are not a power lifter or olympic lifter (these are people lifting really heavy loads and their number one goal is to lift really, really heavy loads - they train differently than everyone else and should based on their goals) you are much more than likely following a bodybuilding program that was designed 50 years ago, by bodybuilders attempting to get really massive and didn't mind lifting weights twice a day for 2 hours at a stretch. There is also the outside possibility that they were using performance enhancing drugs - PEDs (wink wink) while creating and using these programs. You have decided that since these programs worked for them, they will work for you, correct?
Here's the thing. Those programs are based on driving tons of volume (lots of sets) into a muscle group. Unless you have your nutrition and all other aspects of recovery spot on each and every day AND you have the time to train 4 hours a day AND you maybe, possibly might consider using PEDs, AND a pretty solid genetic predisposition, truthfully - it ain't going to happen.
So, without the 4 hours of training every day, without the PEDS, normal genetic code like most folk (including me), what should you be doing instead? Sprecifically programming to you, where you are, with loads and volumes that makes sense, inside a progression model you can modify as needed over time with some sense of physiological truth about how the body adapts to training. And one other thing I'm fairly sure you don't consider. Sequencing.
Sequencing, done consistently and sanely, is the ground from which the best things grow.
Sequencing saves time, forces the myriad systems in the body that help us recover quickly from short bouts of exercse to adapt and get more efficient and improves mental focus which helps drive the entire proces faster and more effectively. Focus gets us inside every rep, every set, gets us to feel what's really going on and results in quality training and therefore less quantity training. Efficacy and efficiency - keep them married together at all times when developing training prgrams. Trust me on this.
You do NOT have to sacrifice load for sequencing. You do NOT have to sacrifice volume for squencing. You Do have to have the courage to work a bit harder for a time until you adapt and change is really, really tough for some people.
Lets take a normal training week for the bodybuilding crowd. You've got your body split up into muscle groups and you've programmed days of the week to train them. Lots of options here, I'm not going to speak to which is "best", because that doesn't exist. All of you, however, are going to train those body parts one at a time. You've picked what movements you're going to do, approximate loads to use and how many sets of each of those loads inside each movement. All of you do it this way, this I know.
Let's consider chest work as an example. You have X amount of pressing movments to do and Y amount of fly movments to do for that workout. Best guess, if you've been training for awhile, 8-10 sets of each, let's say 20 sets total. You have to rest between each set, 2-3 minutes (let's call it 3, keeping it real), so if you allow 30 seconds or so for each set, that means you will complete those 20 sets in 70 minutes. One muscle group, 70 minutes. Let's throw in a little core work at the end, say 5 sets or so, same rest periods as above, you'll get that core work done in about 20 minutes. So, 25 sets of work in 1.5 hours......
What if you could get twice as much work done and in less time and spend less days training at the gym? You know, more time to live life, do what you do, the really important stuff? Would it be worth a listen? Intrigued?
Research tells us that we need 120 sec or so of interset rest (rest between sets of the same exercise) to fully reload the various components needed to be physiologically ready for the next effort/set. My question is, why aren't you doing something with that time instead of nothing? What not do range of motion (ROM) or flexibility movement in joints and muscle groups you aren't training that day? More importantly, what aren't you training the antagonist muscle group - the opposite movement while the other muscles in the first movement are reloading? Am I blowing your mind?
The bench press (or push up which is a bench press with a plank) is a horizontal pushing movement using the chest, anterior (front) deltoids and triceps - the pushing muscles. Why not add in the horizontal pull movment while the push movment muscles are resting. Rest a moment while re-setting your loads. Repeat per your program. Do the same with vertical push and pull. Do the same with horizontal chest fly and reverse fly. Lastly, whatever shoulder/upper back movements you might have left, marry each with a core movment. Leg day? Add one set of bicep and tricep after each movment, a great triset you will probably enjoy.
With this programming principle in mind, you've just combined two workouts in the same time you normally spend physically present in the gym doing one workout (probably less if you'll stay focused, quit yapping with people and put your damn phone away).
Some will say they've tried it and don't like it. Fair enough. How many weeks did you try it? Did you really give it a go, give your myriad physiological systems a chance to adapt, or just try it once, and it was really "difficult", so you just blew it off one way or the other. I'm guessing the latter, just keeping it real. You have to suffer a bit from time to time to move on to higher levels of anything, really. Most won't do that.
Some will ask, "Why do you care how much time I spend at the gym"? Personally, I don't care how much time YOU spend anywhere, but it ain't just your gym, is it? Every moment you're there in the gym, taking up space, is space and equipment someone else can't access and use. I appreciate the fact you've probably never considered that and I'll skip my comments on why that is, but at the end of the day, at least admit to yourselft that the extra 4-6 hours you're wasting each week mean nothing to you and you don't honestly give a damn about anyone else. It's just as much your gym as theirs, right?
Excuse the rant, long time coming.
Back to the new folks. The workouts during your first 60-90 days of training, if you program them precisely and sequence them sanely, should take about 40-50 minutes, twice per week (that includes "cardio", which I'm not going to delve into deeper here). That will roughly be 10 or so minutes of warmup and brisk "cardio", followed by 30 minutes of strength training, ending with another 10 minutes of "cardio". That's it for 4 weeks or so. My progression model pushes that to 3 days per week for weeks 5 through 8 and somewhere in there, we will have a good idea of the "process week" you will need to repeat to complete your journey over time.
Add in walks in the neighborhood, riding bikes, taking the steps at work, walking the dog? Absolutely. The "active" lifestyle has many options, but are beyond the scope of this post, as is the recovery piece of your personal puzzle that is just as important as the exercise - nutrition, hydration, chronic and rhythmic sleep patterns and stress attenuation. Those that attend to all find their way through the forest.
Find a competent strength and conditioning professional to help you get started. Please. Not only will you have a fighting chance to accomplish your goals, you'll do it with less time training, in less total time to your goals and more than likely won't become injured or deal with endless days of chronic soreness.
When people are sick, they trust a doctor. When they have legal issuses, they trust a lawyer. When they need help with finances, they trust an accountant.
It's your body, your goals, your life.
Who are listening to and why?
And why are you resting?