If you ask a good personal trainer how long your workout should be, you will get the same response you get to almost anything; it depends.

It depends on your goal, it depends on your fitness level and it depends on the sport you’re training for.

Say you’re an average person going to the gym to work on the basics. You want to increase your cardiovascular capacity and get your blood pumping and heart rate up.

You want moderate muscle gain and to at least look like you go to the gym. To stay at this level of fit and healthy, anything from 30 to 45 minutes will do.

That’s plenty of time to get in 15 minutes of warm-up work and two sets of three-exercise circuits. If each circuit takes three minutes to complete, you’ve got two minutes rest between them. Five minutes total per round, one practice and two all-out sets each.

Your workout will look like this:

• 15 minutes warm-up
• five minutes practice circuit one
• two x five minute working circuit one
• five minutes practice circuit two
• two x five minute working circuit one

Total time: 45 minutes.

You can even make each circuit and rest period shorter so you’re coming in at something like 30 to 35 minutes.

On days when you don’t intend to go through resistance training, start with some breath work practice.

Then do 20 minutes of interval training on a cross-trainer or a rowing machine, followed by some mobility work.

What is commonly misunderstood is that engaging in this volume of training, with good technique, intensity and resistance, is enough.

How to keep in very good shape

If you’re doing three resistance and two interval sessions a week, none of which exceed 45 minutes, coupled with balanced calories, you will be in very good shape.

The issue here is that most people haven’t learned perfect technique from a professional. They also haven’t experienced what appropriate intensity and resistance are. This reduces the efficiency of the average session.

You’ll usually only see low, 30 to 45 minute dosage in experienced, older gym users. They will be trying to fit their training into a busy lifestyle and have spent a lot of time training under a knowledgeable personal trainer.

They know what movements work well for them, how to execute them well, and how much the minimum effective volume is for them to stay fit and healthy.

What puts most people off though is that they’re going to the gym to burn up calories so they can eat more. This results in sessions lasting longer than necessary to hit that calorie count.

The constant chasing of x-number of calories over prioritising form and volume ruins many sessions.

However, if you’re trying to build significant strength and muscle, you’ll do well to do so efficiently within 45 minutes.

It’s not that you need more than 45 minutes of exercise. It’s that to execute one to three working sets of a movement with perfect form requires a few practice sets first (warming up).

Why you need better form

Otherwise your technique will not allow you to move enough weight or create enough stimulus in your muscles.

You’re also much closer to your maximum capabilities when trying to force significant change in your muscle structure.

This means you need better form. Training close to failure with loose technique is a good way to get injured.

You’re looking at requiring about three minutes rest to recover between each set. With studies showing optimal gain resulting from anywhere from 10 to 30 working sets on a muscle per week, that’s 30 to 90 minutes per muscle!

As you can target over 10 muscle groups in your body this can result in up to 15 hours of weekly training.

Make your work outs more efficient

Luckily many exercises work more than one muscle group at a time. This means you can get away with as little as two and a half hours of total work per week, though this will rarely give optimal results.

You can also make workouts more efficient by using supersets. These target different muscles whilst you wait for others to rest. If that’s a new concept to you then check out our previous article.

Ultimately, the length of your workout depends on your goals and the time you have at your disposal, as well as your experience.

More experienced gym-goers can get more effective work done in a shorter period of time, but you also require more stimulus to make progress.

If you’ve already made that progress though, and are only concerned with maintaining it, this saves a lot of time.

A good personal trainer will help you tailor your workout to your lifestyle and goals, not the other way around.

Joompa is a digital platform that facilitates the sourcing and booking of freelance, mobile personal fitness coaches. Available on iOS or via www.joompa.com.my