I’ve been a fan of the 20 minute workout for years. In fact, I think it’s healthier for you than a 1 hour workout. Not for the reasons you’d likely suspect, though.
If I’m going to go to a 1 hour workout, I’m going to need a few things:
- heavy weights – if I’m going to workout for an hour, I want to really push myself
- two hours of free time – I need to change, get to the gym, workout, get home, shower and change
- the emotional energy to push myself really hard for 1 hour – this can be daunting, especially if I am not feeling at peak performance
So the probability of me skipping the 1 hour workout is significantly greater than 0. I’ll make excuses for myself: “I’m too tired. I won’t have a good enough workout because I’m at a hotel gym with no barbell. I don’t have enough time.”
That results in me skipping the 1 hour, intense workout session. I try to go to the gym every day, but when I’m in this mindset, I end up going 2 days a week. That’s 2 hours of exercise per week. That’s not horrible, but not great either.
Now let’s compare that with the 20 minute exercise mindset:
- I can justify lighter exercises for smaller muscle groups and basic rehab for my shoulders if it’s only a 20 minute workout, letting me utilize those 20 pound weights in the hotel gym
- I can do basic strength training without breaking into a heavy sweat (your mileage may vary on this one, I have some very sweaty friends) – so no need to even change necessarily
- It is dramatically easier on my psyche to sign up for a 20 minute workout than it is to sign up for a 1 hour workout.
So the probability of me skipping the 20 minute workout is significantly lower. I end up working out 5 days a week instead. But here’s the secret: I almost never workout for only 20 minutes. I usually end up working out for 30 or 40. And maybe twice a week I work out for 1 hour or more.
So my workout calendar looks more like:
- Sunday – 20 minute workout turns into 1 hour workout
- Monday – skip
- Tuesday – 20 minute workout
- Wednesday – 20 minute workout turns into 40 minute workout
- Thursday – 20 minute workout
- Friday – skip
- Saturday – 20 minute workout turns into 1 hour workout
In summary, the 20 minute mindset yields 50% higher exercise time than the 1 hour mindset yields, at least for me.
I love James Clear’s framework for this from his book Atomic Habits: “reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule.” He argues that developing the habit across time is more important than the quality of any individual workout.
The other core reason is that training frequency is really important to facilitate muscle growth. Frequency here means “the number of days per week that you train the same muscle group”. So if you want bigger quads, it’s better to workout your quads for 10 sets over two separate days, than it is to do 20 sets on one day (over the same time period). Jeff Nippard does an excellent job reading through the latest literature on these topics and updates his YouTube channel with his current understanding and training approach.