062: How to get in shape in just 10 minutes a day

 In this episode, Mike discusses the benefits of short workouts as a more effective and manageable approach to daily exercise. He emphasizes that shorter sessions, typically under 15 minutes, can still provide significant fitness gains without the drawbacks of longer workouts, such as fatigue and time commitment. He contrasts his preference for shorter, high-intensity routines with longer workouts that are better suited for athletes or those focused on performance. The conversation explores the balance between intensity and duration, and how individuals can tailor their workout routines to fit their personal fitness goals and lifestyles. 

Connect with Mike Chang:
- Instagram: @mikechangofficial
-Youtube: Mike Chang
- Website: www.flow60.com

Connect with Stephen Yeh:
-Instagram: @iamstephenyeh
-Twitter: @iamstephenyeh

Transcript

Mike: [00:00:00] So, so today I want to talk about short workouts and why I believe that it should be the approach that most people take when it comes to daily exercise. And so ever since my bodybuilding back in the days, there's been a lot of changes like in the way I train and move away from weights a lot more, decreased in.

Intensity, but there is one thing that remained the same, and that is shorter workouts. Now, it wasn't like I always did short workouts back then, but I was really known for doing very short, slightly intense, but it was short, I want to call it effective. It's not really intense because we're not pushing to the limit on everything.

And that's something that I've brought now to kind of like the holistic fitness [00:01:00] approach with shorter workouts, shorter practices. Because I think that's a really big thing that stops people from being consistent. People often look at workouts as 60 minutes. That's kind of like the standard, sometimes 30 minutes.

But I believe that we can have effective workouts in a much shorter amount of time. And today I want to dive into that. And we just did a short one. , we didn't time it, but I think it was about 10 minutes, right? And it was challenging, but not to the point to where we feel so exhausted.

And, I want to talk about why shorter workouts, all the benefits of it, we can talk about the cons and the downside of it, and compare that to longer workouts. And my intention is to be able to give a clear overview of what's the real difference between the two. And, you know, let people decide what's really good for them and what's really the best fit because I don't think it's a [00:02:00] perfect fit for everybody.

I think there's, there's some people out there that longer workouts work better. So let's dive into that. First of all, what's your personal preference between short workouts? Let's say short is like maybe under 15 minutes. Versus long, anything over 45. 

Stephen: Well, nowadays I haven't been doing too much weight training.

So with my particular training, usually it's long and it's almost more of like an enjoyable time for me as well. Just to feel the different muscles, seeing where it's stuck, seeing where I need to get more mobile, trying to expand my limits more. And so it's like exploration time for me. Yeah. Which is for the most part, quite enjoyable.

I generally, I like to extend it longer if I can, because I, when I'm in it, I am Appreciating the time that's being spent there. 

Mike: Yeah. [00:03:00] And you mentioned also before that you're in this phase right now to where training is like a big focus for you. Mm. Yeah. So I think that's the thing you see, for me, training is actually not that big of a focus right now.

Stephen: It's like a maintenance for you, just a, it's a maintenance. Yeah. 

Mike: And I think that's the biggest difference is for the people out there, let's say the athletes that are training for games and performances. For people that are really, really focused on evolving their physical abilities, longer workouts work better because number one, they got more time to feel out their body.

They got more time to. To play and be creative, they may start off with a routine and that routine has time to evolve and change with, you know, by exploring shorter workouts. Don't really give you that. Also with longer workouts, they have time to go from warming up to high intensity if they wanted to, or they can just stay in a really [00:04:00] low intensity.

And because of the long duration, they still get a really good workout. You can't really do that with short workouts. You can't have a low intensity for a short period of time and have like a really good workout. It doesn't work. So I think those things make long workouts better. Yeah. Those are the advantages for long workouts.

You know, the people that are really focused on training. And it's kind of interesting because even though we both train, but we're on like opposite. Opposite ends, you're focused on training. I actually am not, right? Like I'm the maintenance mode now for me, shorter workouts. I've been doing mostly short workouts once in a while long, but long would be barely even pushing 45 minutes, you know, or an hour at the most.

I, I don't remember the last time I trained for over an hour. It must've been years ago. My average length for training is about 15 to 20 minutes. We just did 10, you know, imagine that like times two. 

Stephen: Yeah, it would feel pretty good. You're like, okay, even that was like a solid 10 [00:05:00] minutes. 

Mike: So the reason why I prefer shorter workouts is number one, it's easier to fit it in throughout the day.

If I'm consistent in the morning time, you know, the same time frame, it's easier to get it in without having to wake up earlier because now sleep is limited a lot of times. But also I find that it doesn't leave much room for distractions. I only got 10 minutes or I only got 15, 20 minutes. So if you're distracted by message and you answer back a message, you know, that's That's like a good part of your workout that could be, a fifth of the workout is gone literally by just, reading a message thinking and then replying back a fifth of it is already gone.

That could literally have been three to four sets. Yeah, right. 40 something 50 reps. Yeah. One message that takes maybe, , under two minutes. 

Stephen: Yeah. 

Mike: So therefore there's no, room for distraction. We have to be hyper focused and it also [00:06:00] doesn't leave that much room to go super intense and weights.

If we were to train with weights. Because we don't have that much time to go from warm up to, to getting into that heavy weight and we know that we're not going to just go in and try to do heavy weight right away. That's not going to be good. So therefore at best, as we get to a weight, that's of medium intensity, longer workouts allows you to kind of build up, right?

But shorter ones don't. So that may sound like a disadvantage for somebody that wants to go heavy. But what I found is that. To make up for it, to be able to train with very, very little rest times, which we saw how we were jumping from one exercise to another exercise, pretty much without much rest, the rest time is the transition between one exercise to another.

So. It forces us to increase the intensity as far as we have less time to let the muscles recover. We [00:07:00] have less time to catch our breath. There's no more time for hesitation or anything. We just got to execute, especially in the way we were doing it, which is one after another. And if you wait too long, I'm waiting there for you, right?

So for you guys listening, we did three exercises. That was it. And we just did some chest presses with dumbbells and then we did kind of like a farmer walk and also the, um, like a, not a decline sit up, but I forgot what you call those machines. It's like a hyperextension machine where you basically, it's like doing a decline sit up, very similar, except your body's parallel.

And we just did these exercises back to back without any break other than to go from one exercise to another. And I started and Stephen was right behind me on every single set. So then, over time, by like the second, third set, the intensity starts to build up. And even though we're not using very heavy weight, But it still felt challenging.

There was muscular endurance being challenged, [00:08:00] our cardiovascular is definitely being challenged. The only thing that I find wasn't being challenged completely is , maybe like a one rep max. Basically, for those of you listening, one rep max is how much weight you can lift in one time. Your maximum.

Right. Some people call it maxing out. I actually don't even like doing those. I don't remember the last time I did those ever because they're just kind of dangerous, you know, and I wouldn't do them unless you really, really, really, really need to, for some reason, if not stay away from those. I 

Stephen: think that was like back in high school for me, which is like 20 years ago.

Mike: Yeah. When you, when you're wanting to, yeah, I think, I think those are just good for They're more for ego. Hey, this is how strong I am. 

Stephen: Yeah. 

Mike: You know, so 

Stephen: back in the days, but now it's like, no, no reason. 

Mike: I think some people still care, but I think a lot of people that are, you know, if, if they're not 20 years old, they're a little older.

They may kind of got past that. So they don't care that much in that case. Let [00:09:00] that go. So without that being a benefit, everything else I find is really, really beneficial for short workouts. I think the biggest one is just consistency. I think it makes it easier to be able to fit it in. I did a short practice this morning, but I didn't get in much, much strength training.

I literally did a 15 minute practice this morning and had to jump on a call. So the fact that we just did a strength training one that was about 10 minutes, short practices allow that to happen. , when we're busy with our lives and we don't have a lot of time to allocate towards exercise by just having a short practice and even having just one and you're good to go and having the complete components in there.

Usually I would go and do a quick warmup tap and then go into some strength training and then stretch, breathe and meditate. And 10, 15 minutes. It's very, very short. What we just did there is we just focused on some strength training and just did that. And if we weren't about to [00:10:00] jump back on here and do and talk, talk about this, we would have just did a quick stretch and meditate for a few minutes and then start back on our day.

So I think also with short practices, it's not as taxing on the body because sometimes a person's, a person's body can go through a lot of adrenaline rush during exercises. And the way they feel afterwards is there's this shaking, they feel like their nervous system is really stressed because it got really stressed , through really pushing it.

And with these short type of exercises, even if the exercise was really intense. It's so short that there's not a lot of time to get the nervous system to be very agitated in that way. And so that makes it another, benefit. 

Stephen: Yeah. I mean, I can, I can totally tell even right now, just after that short workout, because I'm just remembering back to when I did longer ones [00:11:00] and with proper weights.

I would either feel like what you were saying, like that adrenaline is pumping and , your body's a bit on edge. Yeah. Yeah. Or it would just be super exhausted afterwards. It's one of those. 

Mike: It's like you want to lay down, just chill out and relax for a while. 

Stephen: Yeah. And if you have something that you need to get done, like shortly afterwards, it's, it's hard to operate in that state.

And so, , especially just after we did this short 10 minute one, like I feel more energized from it. I don't feel more depleted and needing to wait until this long rest period before I get energized. Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. And I think that's the difference between people that train for a specific purpose, because if somebody is there, they're an athlete, that's kind of what they do so they can train for three hours.

And then afterwards they can chill out because they've accomplished their, business, their purpose, their work. But for us, if we're not doing that, we need to be alert to go and do the next thing so we don't have a chance [00:12:00] to relax and chill out for an hour or two. 

Stephen: So this is like the, this, the short workout is it's like the 80, 20, right.

And you're just. Using the most potent exercises, throw it all together, do a quick one. You get everything that you need. You're so essentially will help you maintain what you already have. It's not going to help, let's say, increase your performance, but well, actually that's not true. 

Mike: No, it will help you increase your performance.

Stephen: That, yep. 

Mike: I've just been personally on maintenance mode, but this approach do help you increase. Because we can increase performance without having to lift really, really heavy because our cardiovascular can increase. In other words, the exercise that we did, we could have made it a little bit tougher. We could have just added in one exercise that would have challenged our cardio even more.

And then everything else would have been harder. We could have increased in weight or we could have did the same thing. You know, so again, these three [00:13:00] exercises done back to back. We could have had all three exercises to be working on the same muscle group. So, cause we did chest press for dumbbells and then we went to doing apps and then farmer's walk, carrying the heavy, uh, dugs.

So we could have did, let's say the chest press for the chest. And then afterwards we go and do dips. And then after dips, we go right into pushups and then the moment we're done, pushups, jump back on the chest, press dumbbells. So then those dumbbells are going to feel really, really heavy and we're challenging ourselves big time.

So then imagine that. And we did the same amount of rounds. Cause I think we did about four rounds and each round was, was three sets. So we did 12 sets and roughly, I would say the repetition was about 10 reps, give or take. The farmer walks was about. Maybe 15 yards there and back. So 30 yards total. So if it was 10 reps for 12 sets, so we just did [00:14:00] 120 repetitions.

Wow. And about 10 minutes. 

Stephen: That's pretty good. 

Mike: And not just one person, two. 

Stephen: Yeah. 

Mike: Both of us did that amount, give or take. So imagine 12 sets. 12 sets of one body part, that's equivalent to a regular type of 

Stephen: type of 

Mike: strength building exercise. Some would even say that, well, no, no, I wouldn't say that's max or a lot.

That's about regular, right? Sorry. Not is it, is it through? So we did four rounds, three, three sets for each round times four. Okay. 12 sets. Yeah. 12 sets. So yeah , that's a proper amount of volume for one body part. 

Stephen: That's a 

Mike: proper amount, right? According to like a bodybuilding standards where you're really.

Trying to break down the muscle and build more. 

Stephen: No, you're right. I had to take that bite back as well, because when I was like 16, I got this book, it was like a boxing [00:15:00] conditioning book and it was short workouts. It was 15, 20 minutes. But it was straight up like, okay, you're going to run for a quarter mile, like sprint a quarter mile.

Once you get to the end, you're going to do 50 burpees and you're going to do that four times. 

Mike: And then you run again after the 50. 

Stephen: So that essentially would take about 15, 20 minutes if you're really going at it. But afterwards I was, , I was, my training was stupid back then. I was like brain dead afterwards for like an hour after doing something like that.

Mike: Yeah. Like you want to pass out because your blood sugar, is exhausted. Yeah. 

Stephen: And I had no idea about warmups either. So Me and a couple of buddies were just like, you ready? And then we just go and we just started sprinting down and yeah, but so you can definitely get a lot in within that short period of time.

But, uh, yeah, I would not recommend that style so much anymore. 

Mike: Yeah. So, so now imagine [00:16:00] somebody, starting off with something, of low intensity, that's easy. And then they can build themselves up. And they're still training for this really short period of time, 10, 15 minutes, let's say doing 12 sets.

But the intensity is increasing and if they wanted to, let's say, cause we'd spent 10 minutes. So imagine if we spent 20 minutes and we did 24 sets. 

Stephen: Yeah. 

Mike: Right. And we could have worked on our chest and back. We could have worked on chest and probably not even chest shoulder. It'd be like chest, shoulders, and maybe even triceps because shoulders won't even be able to handle that much.

Stephen: I'll for sure feel it the next day.

Mike: And then the best part about that is. Working on cardio big time, 

Stephen: even 

Mike: though we're not doing, , any cardio style exercises, that's the thing that I really noticed back in the day, even when I was doing just strictly weight training, I learned this approach. Actually, I [00:17:00] remember the way I learned this was I found out there's this one guy that works out at my gym.

I think his name was like, Keno, Keno, something like that, you know. It's like a Hawaiian style name or something, and he was kind of dark skinned, but the guy was just lean and shredded every day, all year long. And he just looks phenomenal. You never see him do any cardio.

And I remember talking to friends, and we're talking about, back then I was like a gym rat, spending hours every day at the gym. And I'm talking to my friends, and we're talking about this guy, always in such great condition. And one of my friends tells me, Well, I was talking to him and he told me that he hates cardio.

He really hates cardio. He never does it. We're like, but how does he stay so lean, you know? And my friend says, well, I asked him and he told me, you don't need to do any cardio. All you need to do is supersets. And supersets are basically doing two exercises back to back. [00:18:00] And the concept is you increase the intensity because you're increasing more time under tension.

You're doing more work and, and not allowing your body to rest. So I remember learning about that concept way back and I knew about supersets, but I didn't see it in that way as a way to basically challenge our cardio. It's like a cardio workout when you're not really doing cardio exercises. So this was way back in my twenties.

So fast forward over time, I started to incorporate it more and more until now, fast forward over 20 years later, I realized if your goal is not to become this super, super massive bodybuilder type of look or body, you don't need to lift really heavy. You Don't need to actually spend much time even resting because spend that time doing volume Training and stimulating the muscles.

So this way you're able to get your body to [00:19:00] be stronger You will be able to increase endurance your strength will go up and not like crazy but enough more It's more of endurance. 

Stephen: Mm hmm, 

Mike: but you will get in so much cardio work Because your lungs and your heart doesn't have a chance to rest and whether it's 10 minutes, 20 minutes or longer, it doesn't matter the entire time it's being worked, equivalent to somebody who would be running on a treadmill for 20 minutes nonstop.

And the intensity of this is also, Able to be high as well because somebody would have to be sprinting nonstop for 20 minutes versus if you train like the way we train where it was decently intense, but we could have leveled up even more. That level of cardio challenge is equivalent to doing some pretty high level, , cardio, but we weren't doing any cardio 

Stephen: exercises.

I mean, I could definitely feel it throughout the workout, especially towards the last set. So I was like, whew. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Stephen: Yeah. 

Mike: And when you do cardio, you're not, you're not able to build [00:20:00] as much muscle as if you were to do strength training, but the way that we did strength training. Got the cardio aspect that's been something I stuck to for so many years and it helped me stay very, very lean.

And I've actually managed not to have to do much cardio when I do cardio now, which is like I just jog, I don't do it for the sake of cardio. I do it to be able to maintain the ability to run, to jog, , it's not because I like doing cardio, but I like jogging because I like to be able to, but I don't do it for fat burning because if I want to burn fat, all I do.

Is just do strength training and do it for 10, 15 minutes and just increase the intensity. And it's much more 

Stephen: effective as well. Yeah. Way more effective than trying to just jog the whole time. Yeah. 

Mike: So, so that's been a key component in shorter workouts and eliminating the rest time. It's like. For somebody whose cardio is not really good and they couldn't do that, then they would rest, [00:21:00] but they would only rest long enough to be able to do a, a handful of repetitions on the next set.

Let's say, four reps on the next set 

Stephen: and 

Mike: then keep going. If you can't do four reps rest. And then once you rested for however long you need to just long enough to do four reps. Then that's it. That's your rest. So for somebody it's. 15 seconds for another person. Let's say, 30 seconds. If somebody has to rest 60 seconds in order to go ahead and do four reps of the next exercise, then they need to pick a different exercise.

They need to decrease their weight. If they're doing calisthenics, they need to pick a easier exercise until they don't have to rest that much. And they're able to do at least four reps. That's the, that's more of the formula of how it works, because I think a lot of people are going to decide and go, what type of exercises should I choose?

You know, what can I do? 

Stephen: Yeah. 

Mike: And we noticed, , when we're doing those exercises, we were getting in about [00:22:00] 10 reps for each round and we weren't stopping. So if we wanted to challenge ourselves, we could have increased in weight, make the exercise more difficult, and then we would. Max out somewhere around four or five reps.

Stephen: And that'd be a lot more intense. And then get and think about it like, 

Mike: if we could only do five reps for an exercise, and then we had to move on to the next and we're not resting 

Stephen: in 

Mike: the same 10 minutes, you can get in like 16 sets, 17 sets. 

Stephen: Yeah. Cause each set's going to be shorter, shorter. And it's going to be a lot more intense because you just, you've had to raise the intensity or the weights.

And so, yeah, the same amount of time that's going to increase it by a good portion. 

Mike: And then that makes it more challenging that can cause more muscle building because you're using heavier weight or more resistance on the muscles. 

Stephen: And it's going to be even more [00:23:00] taxing on conditioning as well, because Those four reps is much harder than, yeah.

Bingo. 

Mike: Yeah. Still in that short amount of time. So I was doing that before where my reps were about four reps. Oh yeah. But the reason why there were four reps is because I didn't rest and I would, just keep going. If I was to rest two minutes between sets, then that same set, I probably could do like 12th.

Stephen: Well, that sounds like it's getting more into growth mode then in some ways. And then you, you would also just have to rest more afterwards for sure. 

Mike: So, so this works out whether or not, whether you're wanting to build muscle, whether or not you want to increase cardio. I think the primary thing that really drove me, going all the way back to the beginning was on because I'm in more of maintenance mode.

I just don't care to spend so much time exercising. And I think for everybody that kind of relates to it, [00:24:00] short workouts, I can do so much. And I think before people understand this, they will look at short workouts as just, it's just, it's better than nothing, but it's not that effective. I think there's that mentality, right?

Longer workouts is the proper, but if they do it in this way that we're talking about, they can make these short workouts very, very effective. 

Stephen: You 

Mike: know, it's just, knowing which exercises to pick are the right ones for Intensity wise, like what we're talking about with the amount of repetitions, knowing what exercises to pick will allow you to be able to make it easier.

For example, different body parts for each exercise or increase the intensity, same body part for every exercise back to back, that's very different. And there's all these little levels of, of intensity upgrades without having to increase the amount of time 

Stephen: makes sense. Another thing, I mean, I'm just thinking of people who are just beginning this, they would most likely make sense for [00:25:00] them to start with higher reps first.

Definitely. 

Mike: Yeah, I think because people will either be challenged to cardio or they'll be challenged to endurance. I want to wrap it up with a few examples for somebody to start. So if somebody hasn't been exercising at all and they're like, okay, I want to try this out, but I'm not sure what do I do?

Here's something I'd recommend. So you want to work on your muscular endurance and your cardiovascular health in this, in this format to be able to do this type of approach. So what I would do is I would have two exercises that are focused on muscle building. For example, Squats and pushups. So squats, you can go as low as what feels comfortable pushups.

You can do them off of a table, off the ground or on your knees. And then one exercise to give you what I would call an active rest, which is [00:26:00] you're still moving, doing an exercise, but the exercise is not very challenging. So this way you're able to kind of get a little bit of rest without actually stopping and doing nothing.

So this type of active rest could be jogging in place. It could be knee raises where you basically like stand in your, your knees are coming up and tapping on your hands. This could be also doing very light strikes where you're just striking in the air. So something along the lines of that, it could even be jumping jacks, which could be good for cardio.

And then after that, you go back into squats, pushups, and then this active rest exercise. So the key component here is number one, every single exercise is not training the same muscle group. They're different muscle groups, squats is legs, core pushups, is upper body, chest, shoulders, and triceps. And then marching basically, or jumping jacks, or even running in Trains a little bit of the overall [00:27:00] entire body and keep the intensity low.

Then from there, we can increase the intensity of this by simply removing the active rest exercise. And then either inserting a another exercise that works another body part. Let's say maybe abs, which is sometimes actually an active rest exercise as well for some people. Like let's say. Laying on the ground and doing leg raises or doing crunches.

One other key thing is the transition between the exercises. Make the exercises really, really easy to transition between. So you don't spend so much time switching. 

Stephen: Mm hmm. 

Mike: So that means if you are doing an exercise and you're not really fast at going from the ground, standing up, and then back down. It takes you , five seconds to stand up or longer.

You don't want to pick exercises [00:28:00] where you have to stand up and sit down, stand up and sit down. It's going to take a little while now, even though that in itself. Is good, probably will be good for you, but for sake of efficiency, you 

Stephen: won't really get the benefits of the exercise from taking the 

Mike: benefit probably is more of the standing up and sitting down.

So you want to go into something that has a faster transitions, , for example, if you were to go for squats. And then afterwards, you go and do, bicep curls, or you do rolls or something. And another thing, outside of faster transitions, is you can even use this same concept to insert stretches.

In between the strength exercises, because this is a no, no, when it comes to maximizing the amount of strength building that you can do, you never put stretches in between stretches, relax your muscles and you need your muscles to be really, really [00:29:00] tense to lift more, but when strength isn't your primary focus and you're looking for an overall general sense of health, including strength, but endurance and everything else, then you can even have stretching to be one of the exercises.

It's used, again, like a active rest. But it allows you to be able to still engage your body, still be able to use your body, but rest in that stretching position. It can be a downward dog, can be a forward fold, , reaching for your feet, , it can be like a side bends left and right. And the actual effort of the stretch itself could be, challenging enough for some people that that's a really good start.

Stephen: And 

Mike: then from there, how many rounds do we did about four rounds, right? Where one round is doing three exercises back to back. I think four rounds is pretty good. That could take about 10 minutes, give or take. And then from there, we can work your way up to doing even more rounds, [00:30:00] like 24 rounds. And, , having it to be 20 minutes.

I think a good way to do is, instead of counting the rounds, is just setting a timer. And start off with something like 10 minutes. And then from there, when you want to go up more, try 15 minutes, try 20 minutes. And basically, at some point, you're not paying attention to time, you're not paying attention to repetition, you're not paying attention to anything.

You're kind of on this autopilot of exercise A, exercise B, exercise C, and then you're just trying to make it between the next exercise, trying to make the time and you're going to find it to feel like an eternity. If it's 20 minutes of doing that, it will feel like eternity. So that 20 minutes will be very, very challenging, but that's one approach.

So you can start off with something like 10 and then work your way up and. Doing the same three exercises, but increasing the time. Second option is picking three [00:31:00] other exercises and then starting the 10 minute timer over again. And then you have 20 minutes. If somebody wants to have the most balanced approach, then I would recommend doing a flow practice, you know, flow 60 practice because they're ready incorporates strength training in there, , , but they can still do the same concept and they can do a seven minute flow practice or like a 10 minute or 15 minute because the practice itself already incorporates this approach.

That's why. The 60 moves that we do doesn't have any rest times because they already incorporates this, training approach. It's just that what we're talking about is. Using this training approach to any exercise. So if somebody wants the most balance, I would just ask them to do a short flow practice because it has the stretching part.

It has the breathing and it has the meditation part. And for people that don't have a [00:32:00] habit in doing that, most likely they will skip all three. They would just do the strength and that's it. 

Stephen: Yep. 

Mike: So yeah, that's 

Stephen: it. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you guys for listening to another episode of body over mind and we'll see you on the next episode.