How To Make Them More Effective

Looking to build muscle or lose fat but don’t have the time for long workouts?

Which means instead of spending 1-2 hours in the gym, you maybe only have time for 30-minute workouts.

Sound about right?

If so, you’re probably wondering whether it’s possible to have an effective workout in just 30 minutes, or if it would be a waste of time.

Let’s find out…

Are 30-Minute Workouts A Waste Of Time?

Okay, first things first…

Is a 30-minute workout ever a waste of time?

No!

I hate that people think doing anything less than “the best” is going to be a waste of their time.

As if a 60-minute workout is ideal, but since you only have 30 minutes, you might as well not even work out at all.

This is never the case with weight training, diet, cardio, or really anything health-related. 

We see this all the time in studies. Every study showing us what works best in terms of diet and exercise also shows us that other stuff below that “best” amount still works well. Just some degree less well than the best.

For example, maybe 10,000 steps a day is “the best,” but 7,000 still gets you the majority of those same benefits.

As I remind my coaching clients every time they think they “failed” because they weren’t 100% perfect with something, it doesn’t take being perfect to get results.

So, if you only have 30 minutes to work out, use them.

The real question is… how effective can a 30-minute workout realistically be?

That depends.

Effective for what purpose? What goal are we talking about?

Let’s look at the 3 most common reasons people work out, and how effective you can expect a 30-minute workout to be for that goal.

Can A 30-Minute Workout Be Effective For Losing Fat?

Kind of… but you’re thinking about fat loss the wrong way.

You lose fat when you’re in a caloric deficit, and that’s primarily going to be a function of your diet. Not your workout.

So, technically speaking, a 0-minute workout can be effective for losing fat as long as your diet is putting you into a deficit.

Having said that, any form of activity you do for 30 minutes will burn some calories, and burning some calories can potentially help a little with making your deficit exist on those days.

So if you have 30 minutes available, you can spend them doing cardio, weight training, or repeatedly banging your head against a wall, and you’ll burn some calories in each case.

It won’t be a ton of calories, but it can still contribute a little towards your deficit for the day.

Of course, if you know me, you know I don’t really recommend working out for the specific purpose of losing fat or burning calories in the first place.

What I recommend instead is:

• Use your diet to create your deficit and cause fat loss.
• Use weight training to build muscle or maintain muscle while losing fat.
• Use cardio for its health benefits.
• Consider any calories burned during your workouts to be a nice little bonus rather than the purpose for doing them.

Can A 30-Minute Workout Be Effective For Providing Health Benefits?

Definitely!

Weight training and cardio each provide a ton of mental and physical health benefits, and 30 minutes of either will get you at least some of those benefits.

Even 30 minutes of light and easy walking would be beneficial for your health if that’s what you wanted to do.

Speaking of which, what should you do?

I’d say the best approach for using your 30 minutes would be picking one form of training and doing that for the whole period of time.

Meaning, make it 30 minutes of just weight training or 30 minutes of just cardio.

This would increase how effective each workout can be compared to something like 15 minutes of weight training + 15 minutes of cardio.

Or trying to turn weight training into cardio and doing both simultaneously, which mainly just serves to make both less effective.

Then, depending on how many workouts you can do per week, you could make some of them just weight training, and some of them just cardio (e.g. 3 days of weights, 2 days of cardio).

For health purposes, this would be an ideal approach for getting the best of both worlds.

What About Building Muscle?

30-minute workouts can be effective for building muscle, but exactly how effective will depend on a few things, the most significant of which is your experience level.

So, let’s break this question down even further using experience levels…

Can A 30-Minute Workout Be Effective For Building Muscle For A Beginner?

Yes, they can be extremely effective for people at the beginner level.

Since someone at this stage is either “untrained” (meaning there’s been no muscle or strength gains yet) or “detrained” (meaning there was muscle/strength gains but training stopped and that progress was lost), it wouldn’t take much to make muscle growth happen.

Damn near any amount of halfway decent training will produce results.

In fact, my most basic beginner routine involves 2 full body workouts being alternated 3 days per week (e.g. Monday, Wednesday, Friday), and they can usually be completed in about 30 minutes.

Workout A

1. Squats: 3 sets of 8-10 reps.
2. Bench Press: 3 sets of 8-10 reps.
3. Rows: 3 sets of 8-10 reps.

Workout B

1. Deadlifts: 3 sets of 6-8 reps.
2. Pull-Ups or Lat Pulldowns: 3 sets of 8-10 reps.
3. Shoulder Press: 3 sets of 8-10 reps.

Thousands of beginners have been successfully building muscle with these short workouts for like 15 years now.

Can A 30-Minute Workout Be Effective For Building Muscle For A Non-Beginner?

It’s a bit different for an intermediate or advanced trainee, because the more experienced you are in terms of how much muscle and strength you’ve gained, the more volume (total sets per muscle group per week) you need, the more exercise variety you tend to benefit from, and the longer your rest periods may need to be.

Does that mean 30-minute workouts become a “waste of time” for those of us past the beginner level?

Of course not.

I’m not going to lie to you and say this is ideal (it’s definitely not), or that it’s “just as good as 60-90 minute workouts” (a comforting lie that brings in plenty of likes on social media), but there is a big difference between “not ideal” and “not worth doing.”

This is a case where it’s still absolutely worth doing.

For starters, if you care at all about maintaining the muscle and strength you have — because you’re in a fat loss phase, a maintenance phase, etc. — 30-minute workouts can get the job done quite well.

This is because less volume is needed to maintain muscle than to build muscle. So you can maintain with fewer total sets and/or exercises, which makes 30 minutes a much more realistic time frame.

What about building muscle?

That’s going to take some adjustments to ensure you get the most out of those 30 minutes. Here are the 6 I recommend the most…

6 Ways To Make Short Workouts More Effective

1. More compound exercises, less isolation exercises. 
   With time being limited, your workouts need to be mostly, if not entirely, focused around compound exercises that train multiple muscle groups at once rather than isolation exercises that train just one. For example, expect to get your bicep volume from rows and lat pulldowns rather than bicep curls.
2. More bilateral exercises, less unilateral exercises.
   For example, instead of doing exercises like one-arm bent over dumbbell rows or single-leg leg presses (which double the amount of sets you need to do), stick with bilateral exercises so you’re training both sides at the same time.
3. Leave out the less important stuff.
   “Less important” is subjective, but as an example, if it was me trying to fit everything I needed into a 30-minute workout, the last thing you’d ever see me doing is an ab exercise. The second-to-last thing you’d ever see me doing is a calf raise.
4. Superset everything you can.
   Instead of doing a set and resting a couple of minutes, you’re definitely going to want to pair up exercises that have little to no overlap (e.g. presses with rows) and alternate between them so the time spent doing the second exercise serves as some, most, or even all of your rest period for the first exercise (and vice-versa). Details here: What Is A Superset Workout?
5. Increase your training frequency.
   Your workouts may need to be short, but maybe you can do more of them per week? If so, that would allow you to spread out the total weekly volume you need over more workouts, which means you won’t need to fit as much into each one.
6. Cut out the parts of the warm-up you don’t actually need.
   This is good advice in general, but it’s extra good when your time is limited. So if you’re the kind of person who spends half the workout warming up (e.g. foam rolling, static stretching, etc.), you’re gonna want to trim that down to the essentials. For most people, this would mean doing just a short dynamic stretching routine and warm-up sets for the exercises that warrant them.

Implement all of the above and you’ll be putting yourself in a position to make short workouts as productive as possible.