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The fastest way to get fit for people who don't have time...

Most people have been sold on the idea that 20 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week is the minimum they need to get fit. To get better results, conventional wisdom dictates that more is better. After all, if 20 minutes is good, then 40 minutes must be better, right?

Get fit

While it's true that exercising for longer is ONE way to get fit faster, there's a growing body of evidence to show that shorter workouts might actually be more effective — offering a solution to people who want to get fit but don't want to waste time in the gym.

After six months, 5 out of every 10 people who begin an exercise program will have given up, deciding they simply don't have the time to train regularly. However, there are usually two reasons behind any decision — the real reason, and the one that sounds good! Individuals claiming that "they don't have the time" are often hiding the fact that their expectations were not met. Simply put, they were not making the kind of progress they expected.

While training for longer is one way can improve progress, it's important to note that the link between the amount of time you spend in the gym and the results you get isn't as simple as you've been led to believe.

The 80-20 Rule

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who observed that twenty percent of the Italian people owned eighty percent of their country's wealth. Over time, this has come to be called Pareto's Principle, or the 80-20 Rule. No matter what the name, the principle is still the same — the relationship between input and output is not necessarily a balanced one.

Although the principle was first applied to the Italian economy, it applies to a bunch of other areas too. Eighty percent of a companies sales, for example, often come from 20% of their products. In short, a small number of causes is responsible for a large percentage of the effect.

More interesting still, the 80-20 rule could also apply to certain forms of exercise. In other words, 80% of your results come from 20% of the things you do. Let's take a typical workout routine as an example. Most people start out with 5-10 minutes of low-intensity aerobic activity, such as walking or cycling. Then, they'll spend another five minutes stretching, followed by another 30 or 40 minutes of aerobic exercise.

The fact is, most workout routines usually mean spending at least 60 minutes (maybe more) in the gym. Yet, according to the 80-20 Rule, it's actually only 12 of those minutes that deliver 80% of your results. Just imagine, for a moment, how much time you'd save if you could strip away the wasted time and effort, and focus on the "magical" 20% that really counts.

If you want to boost your aerobic fitness without spending hours in the gym, Japanese scientists have developed a short workout that promises some dramatic results [8]. Check out the figure below. It shows you the absolute increase in aerobic fitness (VO2max) following two different aerobic training programs.

FIGURE 1. Changes in VO2max (ml per kilogram of bodyweight per minute) following two different training programs.

According to the "more is better" theory, the program on the right should have involved longer periods of exercise. However, it actually used workouts that lasted just four minutes. In contrast, program one used workouts lasting one hour!

How can four minutes of exercise produce better results than a workout lasting 60 minutes? To learn why, we need to look...

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