Supposedly all the activity you need for a healthy life is 10â15 minutes per day.
While thatâs pretty low in my eyes, Iâm going to use this estimation as a bit of a challenge to describe a workout program that covers all your bases in just 15 minutes per day.
However, Iâm going to only prescribe 6 days a week, leaving the final day for whatever sort of activity you wantâââor none at all. It will be three distinct sessions, repeated twice, before a day of active rest. Combine this plan with a healthy diet and recovery plan to get the most effect.
Day 1: Absolute Strength
Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash
Absolute strength is a measure of how much external load you can manipulate. Itâs generally what people think of when they call someone âstrongâ. Having high levels of absolute strength depends a lot on your body size and sex.
This type of training not only improves muscular strength and size, but also things like bone density and blood pressure.
Our absolute strength day is going to look a lot like typical strength training with a bit of density training thrown in, but as weâre limited in time, we will focus on a whole body exercise that uses a single implement. Good choices here are sandbag shouldering, barbell power cleans, dumbbell snatches, or trap bar deadlifts. Play around with your own choices here, but as itâs one exercise, it should be a big one.
The Routine
Begin with two warmup sets of the exercise youâre going to do. Thereâs a few ways to go about this:
Do a light set of 5â10 reps, then a heavier set of 5â10 reps. Make both of these lighter than the load youâll use doing the workout.
Or, do 1â2 reps of your working exercise, then rest and do 2â3 reps of the same.
Either way, this warmup portion should be about 3-5 minutes, leaving us around 10 minutes for the meat of our workout. This part is much easier. Weâll set a timer for 10 minutes, and then perform as many sets of 3 or more reps as you can until the timer runs out. The first few sets should all be 5â10 reps while not hitting muscular failure, but as time goes on and you build up fatigue, drop 1 or 2 reps in order to confidently complete each set.
Your ultimate goal is to lift as many total reps in this 10 minute block as you can. If you can do 20 or more reps, increase the load you lift next sessionâââuse the next heaviest dumbbell, add 5â10lbs to the barbell, or put a few cups of sand in your sandbag. If you donât know what load to start withâââstart easy! Start with a weight you think youâll get 50+ reps with in 10 minutes, and go in and give it your all.
Whatever you start with, your rep count will decrease as your load goes up. At first, progress in load will be fairly consistent and youâll be going up session after session. Then it will slow down, maybe even stalling for 3 or more sessions. This is good! Youâre finding the limit of your strength and working on it. Keep at it, but if you stall too long, just change exercises for as many sessions as you want.
Day 2: Relative Strength
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash
Relative strength is a measure of how well you can move load based on your own bodyweight. You can often wrap this up into the absolute strength concept above, but lets shift our thinking a little. We will consider relative strength as the ability to repeatedly move our own body through space.
With that in mind, weâre going to use this training day to focus on bodyweight exercises without external load. Our absolute strength day used big full body exercises, so here weâll lighten the load a little bit. Weâre gonna focus on the torso and upper body, leaving the legs to rest.
The Routine
You want to choose three exercisesâââeach one should be something you can do with minimal or no equipment, and should also be something youâre confident in doing. So choose aâŚ
⌠upper body pushing exercise, like pushups (and variations), dips, or handstands.
⌠upper body pulling exercise, like inverted rows, rope climbs, or pullups.
⌠core exercise, like v-ups, wheel rollouts, or hollow holds.
Weâre going to use a timer like the absolute strength day, however, weâre going to set it to the full 15 minutes. For each exercise in turn, you will be doing as many reps as you can safely do without fully failing. Do each of the three chosen exercises back to back without any rest, in whatever order you wish. This is called a circuitâââone set of the first, one set of the second, and one set of the third, then repeat.
Your main goal is to get through at least 5 circuits in the time allotted. This means that if youâre using an exercise where you can complete 20 or more reps, you need a harder exercise or else youâre wasting time. Thankfully almost every bodyweight exercise can be progressed to be more and more difficultâââthe videos linked above should contain a bunch of good examples. Youâll want to choose an exercise where around 10 reps is your sweet spot.
As you progress to more complex movements, you may need a warmup of a sort. When you hit this level, you can perform one or two circuits of easier exercises in the same category before performing the difficult one. If youâre performing easier exercises like this, stop early (around 10 reps) so as not to overly fatigue yourself. These warmup circuits still count for your target of 5.
Progress will be strange and jerky here. Donât worry too much about which exercises you choose and how many reps you get. Focus on completing 5 or more circuits each session and you will get stronger, more conditioned, and move better.
Day 3: Conditioning
Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash
Iâve written about heavy conditioning before, and weâre going to use it here. But because our previous day was bodyweight circuit training focusing on the upper body, this day should focus on the lower body and let the arms rest a bit.
The Routine
Each day, choose something different. Repeat the conditioning as many times as you can in 15 minutes, starting slow if you need to. Rest when needed, but during these sessions, you ultimate goal should be to reduce the rest you need to accomplish the conditioning.
Hill sprints done by running up whatever hill you have, walking back down, and repeating. This can be done on stairs, or flat ground, but hills are definitely the best if you can get any type of grade.
Shoulder carries with a sandbag, a big rock, a barbell, or even another person. Walk a preset distance, set the thing down for a moment, then walk back. If youâre doing it one sided, switch sides each time you set the object down.
Sled dragging either forward or backward, using official or improvised sleds. As with carries, youâre going to drag the implement from one point to another, pause for a moment, then return.
Rucking with a heavy load in a backpack. Unlike the other three, youâll be walking continuously for the whole time limit, without rest. Instead of minimizing rest here, youâll want to focus on maintaining a good pace for the whole time period, with a goal of completing more distance in the allotted time from session to session.
There are a lot of other ways to get in this style of conditioning. Any way that you can move load from one place to another will count, as long as you do it for 15 minutes. Be creative if you want.
Repeat, Rest, and Recover
After running through the days above, repeat it once. When you hit six sessions in a week, itâs time to take a day off an either rest or spend some time with a low intensity activityâââplay and have fun on this day, donât focus on training.
Recovery is one of the most important parts of training. After a day of training, and on your rest day, youâll want to make sure youâre hitting all the key points of recovery:
Eat enough to fuel your body. If youâre eating less to lose weight, your recovery will sufferâââyou will need to make up for this in the intensity of your workouts.
Sleep 7â9 hours per night. Donât neglect sleep, itâs too important. I consider 7 hours a minimum, but a lot of folks need more. Skip the late night TV and plan for an energized morning instead.
Do some stretching, yoga, or similar at the end of the day to unwind. Explore your own movement in a controlled fashion to help recover from the rigors of training.
Going Further
This program might not be for you, and it might not work for very long, depending on where you are with your training. I try to give everything 4â6 weeks before switching to something else.
But if this works well for you, you might look into working out just 3 days per week, for 30â45 minutes each, rather than 6 days for 15 minutes.
Or you might simply keep at it and see how far you can push yourself. Play with how you progress loads and exercises, plan to back off and reduce loads regularly to keep freshness, things like that.
And as always, let me know how it goes for you!
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