HEATHER MARR

It’s summertime and—with work, personal and social commitments—it can sometimes be hard to find time to fit exercise into our busy schedules. Still, for professionals, it is important to maintain a healthy, balanced lifestyle and find workouts that can realistically fit into busy schedules.

Here are five great summer workout timesavers to save time in your training program without compromising your results:

1. HIIT (high-intensity interval training)

This type of exercise is fantastic if you need to bust out of a plateau or squeeze in fast workouts with limited time. It’s been shown to have significant impact on metabolism and fat loss. Basically, HIIT involves an intense, all out, maximum effort workout, followed by a recovery period, then you repeat. It is sometimes confused with intervals, but, if performed correctly, HIIT is a very short, intense workout. The downside to this type of training is taxing the central nervous system, so it should be limited to several times per week in a properly designed program. It is also something that is better suited to those who are already active, not just starting out.

2. Compound Exercises

Compound exercises use more then one joint and one muscle group at a time. Examples include squats, deadlifts, bench pressing etc. Compound exercises are advantageous for weight loss because they burn more calories than isolation exercises do. You are able to work more muscles in less time, and there is a greater boost in metabolism.

3. Full Body Split

This is a very smart training technique to deliver results fast. Here you would perform a series of exercises one after the other without taking breaks, targeting various muscle groups. It is a full cardiovascular workout, as the heart rate is elevated the entire time, while you are working muscles from the entire body. An example of how to do this would be to perform squats followed by pushups then rows, before taking a quick break for water and beginning the sequence again.

4. Variety

Our bodies are very adaptable, smart machines. When we first start performing a new exercise, it puts a new demand on the body. It feels difficult because it is! Our body has to work very hard, and this uses a great number of calories and has a greater effect on metabolism. As we get better at performing this exercise and more conditioned, our bodies no longer need to work as hard and the calorie expenditure actually decreases. It is important to keep our bodies challenged and to train intelligently by adding variety to our workouts.

5. Rest Days

This is often overlooked: More is not always better. The gym is not where the magic happens. When we workout, we put stress on our muscles and we break them down. When we step away from the gym and we eat the right foods, we sleep and we rest, the muscle repairs and actually grows, and this is how we get lean muscle mass that boosts our metabolism and gives us tight bodies.