Designing a 30-Minute Workout

You like the idea of a 30-minute workout because you find yourself like me: You just really don’t have time for anything longer.

There are just a few of steps that you need to take in designing a 30-minute workout: determining what exercises to do, then doing those exercises in a particular order, next, doing each exercise as well as resting for a particular amount of time. Let’s start with the type of exercises that you need to include.

There are six basic movements that you want to include in your workouts that will work the biggest muscles in your body: Squat, Core, Jump, Pushing, Single Leg, and Pulling.

Along with these movements, you can then break them down into a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced variation.

Let’s look at each movement individually and then look at examples of each variation:

Squat – A beginner variation would be a Lying Hip Extension, an intermediate would be a full range of motion bodyweight squat, and a more advanced version would be a Sumo Squat on your toes.

Core - A Plank is one of the best core exercises out there. A beginner version would be a Plank on your forearms and knees, an intermediate would be a Plank on your forearms and toes, and an advanced version would be a Plank on your forearms and toes but your toes resting on the edge of a chair so that your body is on a decline.

Jump – A beginner version of a jump would be Jumping Jacks, an intermediate variation would be a Leap Frog, and an advanced version would be Bodybuilder Burpees.

Pushing – A beginner variation of a pushing movement would be a Pushup on the wall, while an intermediate version would be a Pushup on your knees on the ground, and an advanced version would be a Pushup on your toes, while resting your toes on a chair so that your body is on a decline.

Single Leg – A beginner version would be a Donkey Kick, an intermediate version would be a Reverse Lunge, and an advanced version would be a Crossover Forward Lunge on your Toes.

Pulling – Pulling exercises can be a bit tough with just using your bodyweight. Ideally you’d like to have something like a pullup bar (even if you can’t do pullups). But there are some modifications that you can do such as a Stick Up, and a Sky Dive with a W Pullback.

These are just some basic examples of each type of movement but as you can see, they encompass the use of your biggest muscles (shoulders, chest, upper back, core, and legs) in order to work your full body.

Now it’s a matter of putting them in some sort of order.

The best way to do this is to put them into a circuit where you’ll perform a certain number of exercises in a row with no rest in between. Maybe you want to do two exercises in a row, then rest for a bit. Or maybe you want to do 4 or 5 exercises in a row before taking a rest.

Let’s start with just three exercises as an example. Let’s say you were a beginner and you put together a circuit that would include a jump, a squat, and a push.

You could design it so that you first did Jumping Jacks, then you did a Pushup on the wall, then you did a Lying Hip Extension. You did all three of those in a row with no rest. Then you would rest for a bit, and then complete that circuit one or two more times.

The last piece is determining how long you want to do each exercise.

You could do each exercise for a set number of repetitions but, that makes it difficult to determine how much time it would take to complete those set of repetitions in order to know that you can get the workout done in 30 minutes.

A better way is to do each of those exercises for a set amount of time before moving on to the next exercise.

Let’s say that you’re going to do each exercise for 30 seconds. You’ll do the Jumping Jacks for 30 seconds, then immediately move on to the Wall Pushups for 30 seconds, then again with no rest, move on to the Lying Hip Extensions for 30 seconds. Then you’ll rest 30 seconds, and complete that same circuit two more times. After that, rest 60 seconds, and then go on to another circuit that you put together.

So in the above example, each time you do the circuit it would take you 120 seconds to complete (30 seconds for each exercise, then 30 second of rest between circuits). When calculating how long it would take to do this circuit 3 times, your total time would be 390 seconds (120 seconds for each of the first two circuits, then 150 seconds on the last circuit since you’ll be resting 60 seconds at the end and not 30 seconds).

Also, in reality, it’s going to take you about 10 seconds to move from one exercise to the next so include 10 seconds between the actual exercises. That will add in another 60 seconds to this circuit example, which will take the total time to 450 seconds, or 7 ½ minutes.

After that, you simply build some other circuits together of these exercise movements, until you have a 30-minute workout in front of you.

There you have it. A 30-minute workout template that you can use to build a quick and effective workout right in your own home with no exercise equipment necessary that’ll give you a better workout than if you did slow steady state cardio on the treadmill for an hour.

Tomorrow I’m going to show you a video of a full 30-Minute Workout that you can try out. It’s going to be a combination of beginner, intermediate and advanced moves and I think you’re really going to like it so make sure to check out my blog and/or watch for the e-mail tomorrow that’ll I’ll be sending out to let you know it’s viewable.

PS. Again, make sure to go over to www.30-minuteworkout.com and fill out the two quick fields to download the 3 free workouts that are available. Give one of them a try based on your training level and see for yourself how great of a workout you can get in just 30 minutes without all that fancy equipment that they have at the gym and you'll see that I truly am on to something.

www.30-minuteworkout.com
www.leanbodytraining.com
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