BuildingBody
Pull back on volume, boost frequency and intensity, and get the most out of your lunch hour with these 45-minute muscle-building workouts!
If you're thinking about lifting on your lunch hour, let me offer what I consider to be two underrated benefits of lunchtime workouts. First, exercise has been shown to increase cognitive performance and energy, which can help during those long workdays.[1] Second, less time to complete your workout means you'll be less likely to drag it out, which can result in a more intense session.
But, unless you're the boss of the boss, you probably have a rather limited amount of time to change, warm up, complete your workout, shower, and change back into your work clothes before someone notices you've been gone too long. I may not be able to help you change faster, but I can show you how to distill a full-throttled muscle-building routine into a lean, mean 45-minute session.
The Lunchtime Workout Plan
While you'll have to back off training volume to some degree—it's simply not possible to get 75-90 minutes of effort crammed into 45—the workouts here compensate by increasing training frequency. So, you'll do each body part twice a week, not once. That also provides a welcome change of stimulus, especially if you've been following a high-volume, once-a-week body-part split for a while.
Remember, when designing a training program, three critical variables can be manipulated either up or down:
- Duration, which relates to the length of your workout
- Frequency, which is how often you train a body part
- Intensity, or how hard you train, especially relative to your one-rep max
With this lunchtime workout plan, you'll be backing off on the overall duration but increasing frequency and intensity. (It would be counterproductive, by the way, to increase all three variables at the same time.)
One other critical point is to stick to multijoint exercises (especially with free weights over machines) as much as possible, because they engage a larger degree of muscle mass, allowing you to train multiple muscle groups simultaneously.
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