Micro workouts
Could Ten-Minute ‘Micro Workouts’ Be The Key To Building The Best Physique of Your Life?
At some point in time it seems to have become etched in stone that muscle-building workouts must follow a very particular format — train different parts of your body, once a day, for somewhere between 40-90 minutes, 3-5 days per week. Of course this varies, but most fitness advice never seems to venture too far from this basic template.
But we’re here to tell you that the greatest gains of your life may well be found on the other side of this formula, that the latest research suggests that training the same movements, more frequently will in fact lead to greater increases in size, and that if you’re currently working from home — you’re in the best position to leverage ten-minute, muscle swelling ‘micro workouts’.
What are Micro Workouts?
‘Micro workouts’ involve performing short, sharp bursts of resistance training, just ten minutes in length, multiple times throughout the day. Although it may seem counterintuitive, training more frequently in this fashion will actually see you training less in total, clocking up just 30 minutes of total workout time per day, 4-5 days per week.
The 'secret sauce' of this approach lays in the intensity you’re able to apply; with just 10 minutes to get through, and then hours to recover, you’re essentially hitting each exercise (or pair of exercises) fresh, enabling you to go all in and lay down some serious muscle building effort.
Train, Eat, Repeat
You may be having trouble envisaging how fitting three workouts into your day is going to be more practical than one, but at just ten minutes a pop and only requiring a single pair of dumbbells, simply grab one workout before breakfast, one before lunch and a final ten minutes before dinner and you’ll soon be wondering why you ever took hours out of your day to make the round trip to the gym. This schedule will also help to manage your blood sugar and appetite, as well as leaving you walking around with a pretty solid pump, 24 hours a day, all in half the time.
The Workouts
The three ten minute protocols below target your chest, shoulders, legs and back — building express full-body muscle. Grab your dumbbells and start a running clock. For each micro workout, perform the prescribed reps of movement one at the beginning of each minute, for five minutes, before immediately beginning five minutes of movement two.
Spread the three workouts throughout your day, ideally aiming to complete them around meal times When you can easily complete each five minute b
last without breaking a sweat, it’s time to upgrade those dumbbells.
Many thanks to Mens Health Magazine, for this article