We are all busy people and exercise is most likely the first thing to fall off the schedule when responsibilities start to pile up. Even if you like exercising sometimes you can’t make those longer sessions work. An hour or more might be hard to justify when you work, have a family, side hustle, or other hobbies. How much do we need to exercise to keep building strength while finding balance with our busy lives?

It might come as a surprise, but you can make strength gains with very short workouts. One thing you have to know, however, is that strength is specific so if you want to get good at bench press, you’d better be doing bench press, not deadlifts. As your workout gets shorter, your effort has to increase.

Some people new to strength training can make progress doing as little as one rep of a lift a few times a week. For many, though, this might not be enough. Generally you’d want to do a few sets per week with 1-5 reps per lift. These sets must be hard, at about 9-9.5/10 on the difficulty scale. This would make for pretty short workouts that you could fit into 30 minutes or less depending on how many lifts you wanted to do. However, because of the difficulty each set needs to reach, it’s not recommended to do long term, but for 6-12 weeks at a time. If you have just a touch more time, however, you can make greater gains by adding in a few “back off sets” (sets at a lower difficulty than your hardest set). It could be a good idea to add in about three of these back off sets. These sets only need to be at a 6-7/10 difficulty. That’s not easy but it is much easier than a 9.5/10.

It might not be appropriate for some people to do basically a max effort every training session, but you can still make good strength progress in a few sets of 8-12 reps and 70-85% of your one rep maximum. This will be a lot easier on the body and let you practice your technique.

All this being said, not everyone responds to training the same way. Some people will see great results and others not so much with this approach. That’s why you should track your progress and evaluate regularly to find out whether what you’re doing is working for you. If you are in a busy time, try out the minimum for six weeks and see how it works. If you’re not seeing the results you want, give another style of training a go.