No I didn’t stop this blog, or go on another vacation, I’ve just gotten really busy with life and work. It happens and when it does, I need to prioritize. While I’ve intended to make a blog post the past few weeks, I had to manage my time in and out of the gym, which got me thinking “talking about the economy of training would be a great topic”.

So lets tackle the million dollar question “How do you manage your workouts if life starts to get in the way???”

To start, I think you always need to assess the situation you’re in. If you’re a competitive lifter with a huge meet (nationals???) coming up, you may want to view this as your job meaning other things in life are going to have to take a back seat. For a non competitive lifter, I always suggest making a “priority stack” and viewing where your training would be on that stack.

For me it would look like this:

• My wife
• My pets (I don’t have kids)
• Rest of family
• Work
• Training
• Social Events
• Playing the guitar
• Fostering pets (I’ve fostered 27 cats in 3 years)
• Rest

This stack lets you make decisions if you don’t have enough time to do everything. If I said “I’m going to make myself practice guitar for an hour a day” then ran short on time and had to choose between that or my training, I’m training…

On the flip side, if I don’t do my job I won’t have a house and that’s where my gym is, so I can’t train. So work is above training.

Family (wife, pets, parents etc…) is always on top of the stack.

What if I can’t eliminate one thing and need to balance?

Good question, and this comes up frequently as things go on that may allow you gym time, but not as much as normal. For example, I lift 4 days a week and these sessions usually take about 90 minutes each. If something were to go on where I had to cut these down to 60 minutes, how would I handle it?

Step 1: Prioritize

Take a look at your program, specifically each day and ask yourself “what is the most important thing programed?” 9 out of 10 times this is going to be a compound lift, such as the back squat. If you had to cut out 30 minutes and still get the most out of the workout, this would need to stay in. Maybe instead, things like the calf raises you’ve been doing should be taken out. Possibly, you can cut out 2-3 accessories of 3 sets each, and in turn just do a few more sets of the compound lift for the day (squat in our example) to get as much work in as short of time as possible.

Step 2: Identify “Junk Volume” in your program:

What is junk volume? In short its any work you do that isn’t really necessary. How do you know something is junk volume vs actual effective volume? In essence I think you know. If you have 6 sets of bicep curls programmed, I’d ask if you’re really getting any stimulus out of the first few before you build enough fatigue to start performing effective reps. It can be beneficial to up the weight a little and just do 2-3 sets, provided their at a higher intensity.

I love burnout work, but I’ll be the first to admit, it can be junk volume. If I don’t have time those 100 banded tricep extensions after bench day can be taken out. Truth be told, it can make a nice 10 minute workout later in the day or the next day to help with active recovery.

Step 3: Think economically:

Why do I use “economically”? Because its easy to answer the question “how can I get the most bang for my buck?”. For this I’m going to use the example of a rest pause set vs a standard 3 sets of 12 –

Rest Pause:

Do 1 set to failure, lets say you get 13 and grind the last 3 reps. You got 3 effective reps.

You take 15-20 seconds to breath, then grind out 3 more reps. These are all effective reps, you know have accumulated 6 total effective reps.

You take another 15-20 seconds to breath, then hit 1, maybe 2 more reps. Bringing you to 7-8 total effective reps done in the span of about 2 minutes.

3×12:

For starters, to even do 3×12, you’re usually using your 14-15 rep max, so it would look like this.

Set 1, 12 reps with 1 being effective. Rest 90 seconds.

Set 2, 12 reps with 2 being effective. Rest 90 seconds.

Set 3, 12 reps with 3 being effective. Finish.

You’ve netted 6 effective reps in about 5 minutes of work vs the rest pause which gave you 7-8 in 2 minutes. So what is more economical???

This doesn’t just have to be rest pause work. Hard cluster sets, strip sets and even sets where you go to failure, then jump right into another like exercise to failure can all give you the same stimulus in a lot less time.

So why don’t people do these methods all of the time? Well, there’s a time and a place for everything plus the intensity is high which makes them hard. Not everyone likes to train as hard as they’d tell you they do…

Conclusion

Busy is a very real thing, I hope all of my readers have busy fulfilling lives with a lot going on, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in the gym and get a good workout in. Just use the 3 principles I outlined about and manage the situation. Who knows, maybe you’ll try the rest pause technique and find something that works for you.