Short Workouts for Busy Mums: The Science of 30-Minute Training

Are short workouts really enough to build muscle? In this episode I break down the science behind short workouts and strength training for busy mums. You’ll learn why 30–40 minute full-body workouts can be more effective than spending hours in the gym. I cover how weekly training volume, muscle growth, and workout design all fit together – without needing to train constantly. By focusing on full-body, efficient workouts and consistent effort, you can get real results even on a tight schedule.

 I also explain how to structure realistic full-body sessions across the week to hit the muscle-building targets from the research – all without “living in the gym.” The goal is to help mums train smart and consistent, so exercise feels doable, not overwhelming.

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the channel, and today we are talking perfect workout routines. And when I say perfect, what I mean is perfect for you. I mean one that fits into your lifestyle. I'm going to show you how to create it. I'm going to show you why it works with science so that you feel like this is something that's manageable, something that you can be consistent with, and something that is actually going to drive you forward rather than holding you back. Because so many mums say that time is their limiting factor. It seems to be the biggest barrier to so many of you. And I think a lot of it comes down to thinking that you need a 60-minute workout in a gym. And let's be honest, a 60-minute workout in a gym is not just 60 minutes, you've got to get there, you've got to get back. The next thing you know, it's 90 minutes, nearly two hours, and that just feels unmanageable. And when it's unmanageable, you don't start, or even if you do, you do it once and you do it inconsistently. You'll do one one week and then you won't go for another three, then you might do another one, and you just seem to be spinning wheel and not really getting any returns. So today we're gonna look at the science, what creates a good workout, and what you need to do in order to get results, and how you can then use that to build a workout that fits into your life, how that might look in a time-saving fashion, and what else you need to do in order to make sure that you're getting as much bang for your buck and the best that you can, and how to optimize everything so that you are getting results with the minimal amount of time. So grab a brew because we are gonna start on the science bit first. So, when I'm talking about science, I'm talking about going back to a meta-analysis by Brad Schoenfeld. So he found that in his meta-analysis, in order to get muscle growth, you needed to hit a muscle group between 10 and 20 times per week. There was no mention about how many times per session, but it was 10 to 20 per week. Now, 20 might seem a lot. You might be like, how am I gonna fit that in? That definitely sounds like a 60 to 90 minute workout. The thing is, he said 10 to 20, and the key is to look at that lower end. I hate to break it to you, you're not an Olympic athlete, so you don't need to worry about the top end, and the bottom end is where you get your squeeze. So let's think about a lime. If you were gonna cut a lime in half and squeeze it, that first squeeze would produce the most juice, and that is a little bit but like your first 10 sets. Then every squeeze after that, the juice diminishes, the return gets less, and that is exactly the same as working out. Therefore, we don't need to necessarily prioritize those higher ends. We're gonna get the juice that we need from those lower sets. So 10 to 12 will work just great for you. Since then, there has been more research and there definitely has been talk about diminished returns, especially the longer you do a one muscle group in a workout. Furthermore, there's also been some science by Wood Science, which was conducted with 35-year-olds who were CrossFit athletes with a good training age. Now, when I say training age, it means it means that they've been training for a long period of time. However, they looked at comparing those that did a three times a week for 60 to 90 minutes, I think it's around 90 minutes actually, and those that did it for six sessions for 45 minutes. The thing was the two groups did exactly the same workload and their results were minimal in difference. Therefore, it goes to show that shorter workouts are just as good as longer ones, and if not more so, because if you can then stick to shorter workouts throughout your week because it fits more into a life and you're more likely to do it, you're gonna get better results. So, actually, shorter workouts might be the exact thing you need, and I've got to say it's something that I've incorporated into my training and I have found works brilliantly because it just means that I don't have so much guilt. I can fit it in around clubs, I can fit it around the school run, and one day a week you might want to make a dinner that's a bung in the oven dinner, you know the type I mean, where you can put it in the oven for 30 minutes or on a slow cooker or whatever it might be, but you don't need to watch it. So then you thought you could go off, do a 30-minute workout, come back, feed everybody, and bish, bash, bosh. That is the kind of thing I'm talking about. This is what I'm saying, and the reason I'm talking to you about this science is so that you can see that it is justified. You're not making excuses, you're not being lazy, it's gonna fit your life, but it's gonna actually work because you don't want to put effort in if you don't think it's gonna work. If the fitness industry's got you thinking that you have to do 16-minute workouts and you know that that's not feasible, then you're almost like, I why bother? It's not for me, I'll just wait until I'm less busy. When in fact, if you did something now and you did little and often, you will get results just as much as those people that are going to the gym for 60, 90 minutes. So, now how do we take that information and put it into real life, into your workouts? How to create a workout from that knowledge? So we know that we need 10 to 12 working sets over a week, but now what? Well, I would suggest that you go for a full body workout. Full body workouts are when you're exercising your whole body with all major muscle groups being used and stimulated in one workout, you're combining exercises that use the upper body and the lower body plus the core in one training session. Now, the benefits of this is that if you then can't do a workout later in the week because something crops up, because let's face it, something's always cropping up, then you haven't missed an entire muscle. It also works really well for busy schedules and it allows you to use lots of compound movements that will ultimately help with both functional fitness and cardiovascular fitness. So we've decided we're gonna do a full body workout. But what does that look like? So I've created three workouts. In these workouts, we have hit the entire body. Now these sessions aren't gonna set the world alight, they are very basic movement patterns, but they're things that everybody could do at home or in a gym. And within that, you can see that I have identified different muscle groups or the key muscle groups quads, hamstrings, glutes, back, chest, shoulders, core, triceps, and biceps. And you can see how many of these exercises hit more than one muscle group. Compound exercises are simply multi-joint movements that work several muscles at once. So we can see that we've got lots of those in here, and you can see, for example, our triceps are pink, we're hitting them on the eccentric press-ups, the push press, the kneeling shoulder press, the single arm floor press. So you can see you've hit them one, two, three, four, five times, and that's just in two workouts. Three sets times five, it's 15. So that is in the optimal range. It's the same with let's say glutes. Everyone loves juicy, peachy bum. We got goblet squats, glutes, glute bridges, lunges, Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, split squats, again hitting them multiple times. But also remember if something then came up and you missed one of these sessions, you are still hitting them, if not within the optimal sets of 10 to 12, maybe just slightly below. And if you knew that something was coming up and you were only going to be able to train twice that week, you might do four sets in the other workouts instead of three, for example. There's flexibility with these ideas. It doesn't have to be rigid. Now we've got all these workouts. We've all these exercises, but what does that actually mean? How is that time-saving, Claire? You've got six exercises per session. How is that saving me time? Isn't that just gonna take me forever? So now let's talk about how to do those workouts in a time-effective fashion. So you've got the first choice is to superset. That simply means to put two exercises back to back with no rest. The most efficient way is probably to do an upper and a lower if you are doing a full body workout, because then you can rest your upper whilst doing the lower, and vice versa. You can always do upper, lower, short rest, upper, lower, short rest, still allowing you to lift heavy. You could also make it into more of a circuit-based, for example, having three or four exercises in a circuit. So doing upper, lower, upper, lower rest, like so. You might get more of a cardiovascular buzz with that because your heart rate will probably remain high doing those exercises. And some people like to do things where it's time sensitive. It means they know that they've got a strict amount of time, something like an EMOM, which means every minute on the minute, and you would do this set amount of reps and then rest the remainder of the minute before moving on to the next exercise. You might do anything from four to six exercises, and then you'd go back to the beginning doing the three to four sets. So that's a way that you can make those exercises more time efficient within a time frame, and you can do it so that you know how much time you've got as well. However, there's no reps. Now, as you can see, I've not told you how many reps to do, and that is because the science actually says that there is no set rep range for muscle growth. It used to be highly said that it was 8 to 12, but science hasn't gone on since there, and it can be anything from like up to 30. But again, if we're trying to save time, do we want to be repping out 30 times? Probably not, because it's gonna take a lot of time. And the key to this is that it needs to be hard. In reality, most people find hard difficult to know. What is hard? What is intensity? How do I know what I should be doing? There are two ways you can identify whether something is hard. You can look at reps in reserve. So, how many reps is it until I get to failure? Or you can look at RPE, which is rate of perceived exertion. So we talk about something called reps in reserve. That's how many reps we are until we cannot lift anymore. And if you can't, if you struggle and can't lift anymore, then you've gone to failure. And then you might think, actually, I probably could do two more reps until I've gone to failure. But at the very beginning, as a newbie, that can be quite hard to judge and be quite difficult to know and a little bit scary at times. You like, do I really want to push that? I don't want to hurt myself, and it can be a challenge to know what that feels like. So another way to do it is something called RPE, which is rate of perceived exertion. That means is how hard it feels at that time. And for us ladies, sometimes our rate of perceived exertion will change varying on the month, how tired we are, all those things. So it might change from session to session, but it gives you an idea of how difficult it is. And the scale usually runs from zero to ten, or one being, oh, I'm lead, I'm lead on the lounger, or I might need to do a little crunch to sit up. I might twist, extend my arm, a little bicep curl as I bring my margarita to my mouth. As you can see, not much exertion at all. Or it could be 10. It might be like you've done several rounds in a boxing ring and a flat on your back wondering and questioning your life choices. So what we would want is around seven to eight. That kind of feeling like I've worked really hard, and if I work much harder, I may not be able to actually leave the gym. So you've got enough in the tank to still be mum, human, and do things, but equally you feel like you might need five minutes just to bring yourself together, kind of rest kind of thing. So if you want to go above a rate of seven to eight and you go for an eight to nine, is that you have got good quality rest and recovery. You're recovering from your sessions, you're ticking the boxes from your nutrition, and you're feeling good, okay? Then that will kind of dictate your weight and the rep range that you are using. Obviously, if you are trying to lift heavier, you might need less reps. And then sometimes you what you might need to do is try to lift, let's use eight kilo weight, and you're doing it and it's now got easy. But when you pick up the 10, the 10 feels so hard, but you could only do six reps, that is fine. Even if you could only do it for two sets and then you have to go back down to the eight, that is progress. So that's kind of trying to understand that progress will happen over time as long as you're slowly making those little incremental changes, and progress might look different week to week, it might be better quality movement, it might be more reps or Mar weight. So it all plays a part in creating this program. And it might seem like, Claire, I don't really understand how you've helped me here. I'm just showing you ways in order to take the exercises and put it into a system that will work for you. And if you're still finding that hard, there is my program stronger, which is personalized training. It's not generic, it's created around you, but it's just training based, it's budget-friendly, it's designed to take the bandwidth out of exercise and to make it as simple as possible. As well as having a plan A, we often have a plan B as well for those weeks where it goes a little chaotic. So, practically, what are the takeaways from this episode? One, eight to 15 sets per muscle group is gonna be fine and dandy, although 10 to 12 is probably optimal for you. These sessions can be spread between two and probably four or five sessions a week, depending on your time availability, and 20 to 40 minutes is more than enough time. Yes, the gym is the gold standard, but working out at home is absolutely fine. Although I would suggest getting adjustable dumbbells so that you can increase those weights and create some progressive overload without having to keep buying more dumbbells. You can get cheap options in different places like Argos, Facebook Marketplace, some supermarkets, wherever it may be. Have a look around, and the key to remember is that consistency is gonna win through. Choose a workout program that allows you to keep on doing it. That doesn't mean you have perfect weeks, it doesn't mean that every week is gonna see three to four workouts over 20 minutes, but as long as you do it enough and consistently enough, you will see results. Even if one week is two workouts and the next week is three, and then the next week's two again, and then the next week's four, that is better than just doing one and then none, or not even getting started because the idea is too overwhelming. I hope you found this useful. If you have any questions, I'll pop them in the comments below. I will happily answer those. And if you haven't already, do this girl a favor and subscribe.