Really Short Weightlifting Workouts Work

Weightlifting makes me happy. Spending hours at the gym does not. So I’m excited about new research showing that a gym session doesn’t have to be much longer than a shower to make muscles stronger and offer health benefits. How does 13 minutes sound? Seriously.

In one new study, 34 healthy men who already lifted but weren’t meatheads trained three days a week doing a prescribed batch of squats, bench press and other resistance exercises to failure (meaning they were barely able to do the last rep in a set). The men were divided into three groups:

• One group did five sets of each exercise (overkill by any reasonable human standard, I say), with 90-seconds of rest between sets and a total of 70 minutes working out.
• Another group did three sets (that’s more like it!), spending 40 minutes total.
• The final group did just one set of each exercise and spent a whopping 13 minutes getting buff.

You read that right. One set, 13 minutes.

After eight weeks, the scientists retested the maximum weight each guy could bench and squat once. And they retested how many reps they could muster lifting half their max weight.

Strength and endurance increased for all three groups, “with no significant between-group differences,” the researchers…