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This podcast is for people who want to feel fit, strong, and energised again – but haven’t found a way to make fitness hold when life is busy.
You’ve tried plans that work on paper but fall apart under pressure.
You’ve had periods of momentum, followed by long stretches of drift.
Not because you don’t care.
But because most approaches weren’t built for real life.
On this podcast, we talk about how to build strength, energy, and confidence in your body inside a full life – not an ideal one.
Training that adapts when work ramps up.
Nutrition that stays simple when attention is limited.
Habits that survive travel, stress, family, and changing weeks.
These are honest conversations about systems, mindset, and identity – and how fitness stops slipping to the bottom of the list and starts reinforcing the rest of your life.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about training, training time, and how much we actually need to dedicate to our workouts. And I remember when I was younger, I truly believed I had to be in the gym for an hour, ninety minutes, like even two hours to actually get a decent workout. And nowadays, I mean, most strength workouts are usually around thirty minutes, sometimes less. And today, I really just wanted to try and just off the cuff identify maybe some of those beliefs, break them down a little bit, and give you actual practical strategies to reduce your workout time, some of the systems and approaches that I use to actually fit it into that sort of short pocket of time. So I guess to first address the topic of why we seem to feel workouts need to be sixty minutes, ninety minutes, two hours long to be effective.
Speaker 1:I do believe that a lot of this has come from the trickle down of bodybuilding approaches, bodybuilding culture into the mainstream. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? With anything to learn from the experts in a certain area is the way that's how it actually addresses the general public. And we learn from them, and then we apply it in a way that actually fits like the general person versus the specialist. But the problem is I feel like with bodybuilding, we haven't had that adaptation.
Speaker 1:We've actually just accepted that that is the way that we should train. So we need to be doing lots of volume, lots of sets, pushing ourselves absolutely to failure, and being in there for an awful long time. So I think that's one of the reasons. And then the second reason, which the intent is right, but I think the actual way we action it is wrong, is that we see so much on social media now, and it's across such a diverse range of disciplines. So we'll obviously see strength training is good for us, cardio is good for us, mobility is good for us, maybe skills, all these different things.
Speaker 1:And suddenly we have this huge list of action points that we need to actually implement in order to feel like we're doing the right thing. So you can imagine that if you are doing all of those disciplines in one workout, then it's obviously gonna take a long time to get them done in most cases if you don't have a really efficient way of doing it and reaping the most out of a short space of time. And I feel that that has had a real negative implication because most people are stuck in this all or nothing mindset where they either want to do it all a 100% perfectly, all needs to get done, or they do nothing at all. And the problem is when you have such a demanding system in place that requires so much input, so much time, probably specific locations, lots of equipment, lots of, like, perfect conditions. When those things don't happen, then it obviously all falls apart.
Speaker 1:And, great intent, but the actual execution often falls to the wayside and nothing actually moves forward. So I think those are the main two reasons from my opinion why we perceive it necessary to actually work out for a long time. I think there's also a slight side angle as well, which is actually the way that we utilize that time once we're there. I think people tend to have like a lot of inefficiency in their plans. So maybe they're not timing their rest periods, so those rest periods start getting up to like four or five minutes.
Speaker 1:Maybe they're chatting. Maybe they're on the phone. There's a lot of distractions right now that actually stop you from being efficient with your workouts too. So if you are focused on longer workouts, there's gonna be some actionable things that I'm gonna tell you, but I think one of the number one things you can do is actually, you know, call yourself out if you are, like, faffing around in your workout and actually not just, like, getting it done. Right?
Speaker 1:Getting stuck in, no distractions, all that sort of thing. So practical things that you can actually do. Now I don't do much how to content nowadays, much more about the what and the why, But I thought it'd be nice today to jump into a bit of how to. So there's a few practices that I use to make workouts super, super efficient. So number one, without a doubt, is have a plan.
Speaker 1:Simple as that. If you know exactly what you're doing every single day, you're not gonna waste any time thinking about what you need to do. So you can literally get started, whether it's at home, whether it's a gym, or wherever the location, you know exactly what you're gonna do, and you go and execute that plan. That's absolute number one. So know the plan.
Speaker 1:Have a plan in place. Number two is no particular order, by the way. Number two is have flexibility baked into that plan. So maybe a scenario of this is that you're at the gym and the piece of equipment or machine that you wanted to use is currently unavailable. So rather than waste time by waiting for it and feeling like that is absolutely essential in order to do the workout how it should be done, have flexibility baked in so that you know how to adapt.
Speaker 1:So maybe that's alternative pieces of equipment, alternative locations, alternative time, like demands, or anything like that. We've talked a lot about that flexibility before. So if you wanna learn about that, you can jump through some of the other podcasts. But I think the one that's specific to this is maybe have, an exercise alternative to be very, very precise with this. So that way, when you're executing your plan, if there's a stumbling block, maybe you're traveling, maybe you're a busy gym, maybe whatever the reason you have like flexibility so you can continue to execute without having to like wait for external circumstances to line up basically.
Speaker 1:Now two are a bit more these two are a bit more practical within your plan itself. So the first one is to use something that we call antagonistic supersets. Now I don't want this to overwhelm you or sound too complex. It isn't complex at all and it's not even an advanced training technique. It's purely just the way that you actually order the workouts.
Speaker 1:So an antagonistic superset is basically where you do two exercises which are sort of the opposite to each other, or we could just say they work different muscle groups. Antagonistic basically means opposite. So in a very true sense, this would be like a row with a push up or an overhead press with a pull down or a pull up, something like that. So that's typically what it means, but we don't have to stay 100% true to it. And we can put some exercises together that don't that just work different muscle groups.
Speaker 1:So that could be a squat with a push up, for example. Now what we do is rather than do them in straight sets, so three sets of push ups and then three sets of squats, we do a set of push ups, take some rest and then a set of squats and then we repeat that three times. So you've probably heard the term superset before. Typically in bodybuilding that's about like doing the same working the same muscle but with a different pattern, a different muscle pattern. So that would mean that we're really fatiguing the muscle.
Speaker 1:We're not actually aiming to do that with the antagonistic supersets. What we're doing here is actually almost doing something that's too good to be true. So the problem when we want to do a short workout, for example, often what we do is that we reduce the rest periods, which is going be point number four. But just assume that we're reducing the rest periods. But the problem when we reduce the rest periods is that we can't perform as well on that subsequent set because we haven't had as much recovery.
Speaker 1:Right? So if you do a set of push ups and you only rest for thirty seconds versus if you rest for five minutes, obviously if you rest for five minutes you're going to be able to do a lot more in that second set than if you only rested for thirty seconds. So I hope that makes sense. If you do an antagonistic superset, what it means is that you can have short rest periods. So even, let's say, thirty seconds, forty five seconds, a minute, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:And by the time you come back round to the first exercise, then you've actually had way more rest. So you can imagine you do your push ups, thirty seconds rest, you do your squats, thirty seconds rest, you come back round to your push ups. So maybe the time it took you to do the squats plus those two thirty second rest periods, maybe you're at two minutes rest by the time you get around to the push ups, right? So you can see how you're almost getting the best of both worlds where you're having a very efficient workout because you're having short rest periods between sets, but you're not building up that fatigue or that you're not impacting that performance by doing straight sets and having a short rest period. So I hope that makes sense, and I hope I haven't overcomplicated it because it is very, very straightforward.
Speaker 1:Let me try and summarize it without babbling because I'm literally doing this off the cuff right now. But antagonistic supersets, two exercises paired together, working different muscle groups. You take rest between the supersets. You don't necessarily do them back to back. And the whole point is that you can use a short rest period, so your workout's really efficient.
Speaker 1:But you are only repeating the exercise after two rest periods and the exercise in between, so you're getting a lot of recovery between the exercises as well. What that means is that you can make your workouts really, really short, less than half an hour or half an hour, even if you're doing five, six, seven exercises. It means that you still get great performance because you're taking decent rest between two different access two of the same sets of an exercise. You can get a lot of volume in with different movement patterns. So for example, today, I've just been in and I did push and legs together.
Speaker 1:So I would do a push exercise and a leg exercise, push exercise and a leg exercise, push exercise and a leg exercise. So for six exercises in total, I did three x three sets of each as the antagonistic superset with a minute rest in between here or there. So when you do that, imagine most people, if they were doing six exercises, they would probably be in the gym for an hour or maybe ninety minutes give or take. So you can see when you use that method, which brings us on nicely to point four, which is dial in your rest periods. I think really being strong on your rest periods is gonna keep you from faffing around.
Speaker 1:I think that comes back to the original point of trying not to get distracted, trying not to chat, trying not to have your phone on you or any distractions. Obviously, if we're going for super flexible workouts and you're at home and the kids are all over you and you're doing multitasking, fair enough. Like, we're we're dialing it in and we're locking it into other tasks. But if the sole focus in that moment is the workout, I really advise you to, like, get stuck into the short rest periods and actually keeping them on track. In fact, to be honest, even if you had two minutes rest and you did six exercises and you did straight sets, not antagonistic supersets, you'd still only be training for, like, forty minutes.
Speaker 1:Right? So it just shows you how much time you can waste by not being dialed in on those things. So number one, have a plan. Number two, be flexible with the plan so you're not letting external circumstances dictate your workout. Three, antagonistic supersets to get the best of both worlds, short rest periods and recovery.
Speaker 1:And four, really stay strong with your rest periods. And as a side note to that, don't get distracted, don't chat, Get off your phone and actually lock into that actual plan, and there's literally no reason why your workouts can't be insanely effective, high volume, and short at the same time. And, you know, listen. We haven't even talked about HIIT training. Right?
Speaker 1:Not none of this is to do with circuits, being sweaty, doing glorified cardio. This is true and proper strength training for building muscle and getting insanely strong. So if you want help with any of this, you can DM me the word Vibrant on Instagram or Facebook,
Speaker 2:and we can have a chat about how we could
Speaker 1:make this work for you. Other than that, take action, put this into practice, and if you have any questions, just drop me a comment on the video. Peace out.