Can just 20 minutes with a personal trainer really make a difference? In this episode, Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher explain why effort – not time – is the true driver of fitness results. From the science of stimulus to the dangers of overtraining, they reveal how shorter, smarter workouts can transform your body and redefine your approach to exercising.

• Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher discuss whether the amount of time you spend exercising is indicative of what results you should expect.
• Amy kicks things off by introducing the 2x 20-minute approach the Exercise Coach’s personal trainers advise their client to embrace.
• Some clients ask whether they should exercise more to accomplish their fitness goals…
• Dr. Fisher touches upon the inefficiency or lack of quality that’s almost always tied to working or exercising for long periods of time.
• According to Dr. Fisher, what we need to think about in terms of exercise is stimulus.
• Exercise is the stimulus to adaptation, it’s not the adaptation in and of itself. 
• The goal is for exercising to provide the stimulus to our body to improve our cardiorespiratory fitness, our ability to deal with blood lactate accumulation, to recruit muscle fibers, get stronger, and increase muscle size and our metabolism.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy talk about the danger of overtraining and what that may lead to.
• A 20-minute session with a personal trainer can do wonders when it comes to your fitness goals – Dr. Fisher and Amy explore why that’s the case.
• Remember: the key is not how often and for how long your train but it’s effort level you’re working at.
• “What we encourage our clients to do is, basically, to become more in tune with their own body to understand the sensation that the stimulus of a full effort of an exercise session gives your body, and to understand how long your recovery will take,” says Amy.
• Amy has noticed how eye-opening it is to her personal training clients to get to know their own body, see and feel it respond to the stimulus that we’re creating, and watch it change.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy discuss the importance of following a sustainable workout.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy point out the difference – and common mistakes – between a workout at a regular gym and a session with an Exercise Coach personal trainer.

Mentioned in This Episode:

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Previous episode – The 6 Essential Elements of an Effective Strength Training Program with Matt Brzycki

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SHOW TRANSCRIPT

With a lot of intensity, you could probably accomplish a lot in a short amount of time.

Really, what we need to think about in terms of exercise is stimulus. Exercise is the stimulus to adaptation. It’s not the adaptation in and of itself.

The secret, like we always talk about, is working at the right level of intensity. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well-being. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Sagan, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode. I’ve got a question for you. So have you ever been in the mindset of feeling guilty about yourself for not spending long enough exercising, creating maybe a goal for yourself of I’m gonna exercise for 30 minutes a day every day for the rest of my life and then pretty soon one or two weeks go by and you miss those 30 minutes and you just feel like giving up. I think that’s a very common experience. It’s easy for people out there to associate how much time they spend exercising with maybe what their fitness outcomes will be. And we’re here to talk about that concept today, whether or not we have to, you know, think that we have to do more. When we meet people at our exercise coach studios, we introduce them to our 20 minute, twice a week strength training program. And oftentimes we hear hear the question, well don’t I have to do more? Should I be doing more outside of here in order to accomplish my physical fitness goals? So that is what we are talking about today, is the amount of time I spend exercising indicative of what results I should expect. How are you doing Dr. Fisher? I’m doing very well, thank you Amy. How are you doing doctor fisher.

Very well thank you amy how are you today i’m doing well i’m doing well and i wanna know you know.

What do you think about this question and when it comes to how much time people spend exercising does that tell the whole story about what they are accomplishing?

I mean, another great question.

Um, and, and of course the time we spend doing something doesn’t really tell the whole story at all. Um, we can, uh, we can certainly be very inefficient when we, especially when we start to move into higher, uh, time zones of, of, of really trying to do anything. You know, it’s not a badge of honor to think that we’ve worked for 20 hours of the day, because the reality is a lot of those hours were probably very unproductive. And if we start to think about exercising for longer and longer, we almost certainly have to recognize that the quality of that exercise has dropped. Uh, the effort level has dropped and so forth. So really what we need to think about in terms of exercise is stimulus. Exercise is the stimulus to adaptation, it’s not the adaptation in and of itself. So we want the exercise to provide the stimulus to our body to improve our cardiorespiratory fitness, to improve our, um, ability to deal with blood lactate accumulation, to recruit muscle fibers and to get stronger and increase muscle size and increase our metabolism and so forth. And more often than not, we actually accomplish those things with lower volume or lower time, higher effort exercise as opposed to longer duration exercise. The reality is with anything you can either work hard or you can work for long, but you can’t do both.

You know, if I say to you sprint, you can’t sprint a marathon. You have to decrease the intensity to be able to carry on going over that length of time or that duration. You know, so we just simply can’t do the kind of effort level over that kind of time scale, so hence the difference in quality. Okay, so what you just said is that you described an inverse relationship between the level of intensity we can perform exercise at and the amount of time we can do that for. And so, is it fair to say then that the higher level of intensity of the exercise, the lower amount of time by necessity it will take?

JS Yeah, exactly.

CM So, could we then go one step further and say it’s possible to in fact accomplish more metabolically, strength-wise stimulating adaptations in less time than spending a lot longer exercising?

Yeah, absolutely. So our exercises are stimulus and we have to recognize that if I do more of this, then I don’t provide more stimulus. I actually potentially eat further into my body’s inroads and my body’s ability to recover from the initial stimulus. So it might be that I almost induce a degree of overtraining if I’m not careful, if I’m certainly working at that higher effort level. So we, you know, and I’m not suggesting that people will overtrain if they go and do two or three workouts a week, that’s not the case at all. But if you are thinking that you should go and train, do strength training every single day of the week, that’s certainly going to be counterproductive. You need to have some rest time in between those sessions to allow your body to adapt to the stimulus of a workout.

A great analogy was once made to me about being in the sun. The sun is the stimulus. If you go out in the sun, you take in vitamin D and you absorb the sun and your skin will tan and so forth. But if you go out in the sun for too long, the stimulus is too great and your skin will tan and so forth. But if you go out in the sun for too long, the stimulus is too great and your skin will burn. And exosilasis is exactly the same. We want just sufficient stimulus to simulate the adaptations. And of course, there’s a big difference in the sun at different lustre levels. The closer we are to the equator, the more intense the sun will be, or the hotter the temperature, the more intense the sun will be, and the less time we can spend in the sun. And that’s the same with exercise.

If we do it at a higher intensity, then we want less duration and less time spent doing that exercise.

Absolutely, okay. So is 20 minutes really long enough to achieve the results that matter the most to people?

Yeah, 20 minutes is absolutely long enough. So in 20 minutes, most people who are listening to this podcast or exercise coach clients know exactly what can be accomplished in 20 minutes, the number of exercises that they can do. And that’s exactly, or that’s certainly enough to stimulate the adaptations to your muscles, to your cardiorespiratory system, to your metabolism, to make improvements in your health, long-term improvements in your health that you are not even seeing today, as well as short-term improvements in your weight management, in your glucose metabolism, and in your physical function and muscular strength and size. So certainly 20 minutes twice per week is absolutely sufficient. And the key here is the effort level that you’re working at.

Yeah, if you have done an intense workout, a strength training workout to fatigue, and similar to how we do them at our exercise coach studios, you will know that you’ve received a stimulus. Your muscles, that full body workout will be a powerful stimulus from which you will need recovery. And what we like to encourage our clients to do is basically to become more in tune with their own body, to understand not something external or superfluous like this many steps, I sweat this much, my heart rate is that, but really to understand the sensation that the stimulus of a full effort, whole effort exercise session gives your body and to understand how long your recovery will take. Some people’s bodies take 48 hours to recover for that muscle repair to happen and all those other wonderful adaptations to occur. Some people it takes longer and learning about your own body and how many days between workouts even that is ideal for your body to recover and to be ready to come and feel it respond to the stimulus that we’re creating and watch it change and feel it change, sometimes in a way that it’s never done so before. And the secret, like we always talk about, is working at the right level of intensity. And what you just said is that we can only work at the right level of intensity for

60 to 90 seconds per muscle before we’re totally fatigued. Is that fair?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, the more important factor, and if people are interested in time spent as a measure, what they should think about is time spent over the next year or time spent over a lifetime. So it’s the regularity of their workouts, it’s two workouts a week, but for the next year or the next two years or the next five years or the next 10 years, how long can they sustain that? We’ve previously had Matt Broski and Wayne Westcott and some of these fantastic authors and researchers and academics.

A lot of the recurrent themes by these guys is that the workout should be sustainable. So the idea of going into a gym for two hours a day for the next seven days is, well, it’s not even great in principle, but at best it’s great in principle, but in practice it’s terrible and it’s absolutely not sustainable. So we know that 20 minutes can be the right amount of time where you can work hard for that time and know that it’s going to be over in 20 minutes.

So you can really give your all and be done and then go away and rest and recover. And your metabolism is boosted for you know 48 to 72 hours post-workout so you’re burning extra calories in your recovery from that workout you’re burning extra calories in that in that metabolic response in that muscle building response so you simply just don’t need to get back into into the gym into the exercise coach to do another workout, uh, so quickly, uh, and then repeat and rest and recover and then repeat.

I love it.

I mean, we meet clients every day who tell us, I have never been able to stick with an exercise program in the past because it just takes too much time. My lifestyle doesn’t allow it. My work schedule doesn’t allow it. I’m too busy. And so it’s easy for people to go five, ten years without really meaningfully exercising at all, you know, in a sustainable way. Once they find a program that allows them to achieve continuous results in way less time, that alone is a solution that they’ve been looking for in order to finally succeed with a program, the fact that it doesn’t take very long, right. And that you can schedule it right into your, to your life. And it really, really is great news for people who are busy and don’t like to spend hours and hours exercising.

Yeah. And of course, when we talk about time spent, people listen to this podcast, they might go to the gym and they might spend an hour or they might spend two hours in the gym But the question they have to ask is what are they doing with so much of that time? Because when I go to a commercial gym, I see so many people sat around talking with their friends It’s using it like a social event and there’s no problem with that

But that’s not workout time. I see people on their phone checking their emails or updating their Instagram, and that’s not workout time either. Whereas when you step in the door of an exercise coach studio, you’re greeted by a coach and you walk through a 20 minute workout without interruption, without phones, without, you know, any unnecessary social interactions. It’s all about the quality of the workout reduced into a 20 minute time period.

And that’s really the key emphasis here, that it’s about quality, and the quality that can be achieved in 20 minutes.

Yeah, it’s like when you’re focusing on something with a lot of intensity, you could probably accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. We understand that with work and things like that, but that Exercise Coach Studio environment, we are here to focus on you and your workout.

That’s it. And that’s what our clients really appreciate, right? And that way they can get that great experience and then get going. So I love it. Do you have any other comments about this, about this question about time spent?

I have one final comment, and it links to something we’ve talked about previously. We’ve talked a lot about supervision on this podcast. And one of the key things that I’m gonna say is that it’s hard to go into a 20-minute workout when you’re on your own.

But the idea of the exercise coach is that there is a coach there that will, that will take you through the workout. So that supervision holds you accountable. It holds you accountable to the effort level that you’ll achieve in that 20 minutes, which you might not achieve, which the evidence says that you won’t achieve if you don’t have supervision there, and it also holds you accountable to working to within that time period. So, you know, supervision is really a key part or really a key factor in being able to do a workout in this time scale, at this effort level, and it being the stimulus required for the adaptations. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, we know that people work much harder under the supervision of a trainer and so if we want to maximize our results for our time investment that is the definitely the way to go. Awesome. Well, thank you for breaking this down for us. So remember everybody, it’s not about external things like time spent moving around more, steps taken, sweating, soreness. It’s not none of those alone are really the indication of the quality of what you’re achieving through your workout. The goal is right intensity exercise to fatigue to really stimulate your muscles to change and adapt. Once you do that and you do that with regularity, you will see the outcomes that matter the most to you and that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day. So keep that in mind. I hope you gleaned something new from this series in this episode and we look forward to seeing you next week on the podcast. Hope you remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts,

YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health. Here’s to you and your best health.