With work and the kids it gets difficult to carve out some time to exercise. Or when you do finally have time you’re just too tired to go to the gym so you end up staying home and feeling semi guilty that you didn’t exercise.

Nothing is more valuable than your time.

It’s definitely not easy finding an hour to an hour and half to go to the gym, warm up, figure out what you’re going to do, and then start your workout. Or even if you do go you might not know what to do so you just end up getting on the treadmill or elliptical for 30 or 40 minutes then leave. Doing the treadmill or elliptical can be effective but only for a short period of time, then you will start to get boring and you will plateau.

One thing to get you started working out effectively would be to begin incorporating strength training. Start by picking 3-4 exercises and do 3 sets of 10 reps of each movement. You can start out with the movements being bodyweight like air squats, push-ups, and sit-ups, and then you can slowly build on that by adding more sets and reps, more exercises, or weights like dumbbells.

Another type of working out you can do is tabata style workouts. This style of working out is highly effective in both the aerobic and anaerobic pathways. The way tabata works is you will go hard on a movement for 20 seconds then rest 10 seconds and you will complete 8 rounds for a total of 4 minutes.

Now there are a number of different ways you can go about doing the movements and rounds. One way is to stay at the same movement for all 8 rounds and then move on to a different movement. Another way would be to pick a few exercises and just keep cycling through them until you complete 8 rounds of each exercise.

There are more ways to do this style of workout like only completing 4 rounds of each exercise rather than 8; this way you can add more movements. Once you start to understand this style of training you can then change things up and work for longer periods of time like 30 seconds. Incorporating these two styles of working out will help shake things up and get you starting to look and feel good right away!

No time to exercise? Here is one week of workouts to get you started!

Bodyweight!

10! In this workout you will complete 10 reps of all 3 movements then move down to 9 reps then 8 and so on till you complete 1 rep of each movement. To modify this you can start at 7 and then go down or start at 5 and go down.

Push-up 10/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1

Sit-up 10/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1

Squat 10/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1

Bodyweight Tabata

This is a tabata workout so 20 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest and you will complete 5 rounds. One round is going through each exercise once, so you will not stay at the same exercise for all 5 rounds.

Scissor jumps 5x / Rest

Burpee 5x / Rest

Squat jump 5x / Rest

High knee 5x / Rest

Plank 5x /  Rest

Dumbbell shoulder workout

You will do 3 sets of 10 reps for each movement: front raises, lateral raises, strict press, arnold press. Rest 60 seconds between each set.

Full body workout

For this workout you will work for 30 seconds and then rest for 15 seconds. You will stay at the same movement for 4 rounds before moving on to the next.

Dumbbell thruster 30s / Rest 15s

Sprawl 30s / Rest 15s

Dumbbell deadlift 30s / Rest 15s

Jumping jacks 30s  / Rest 15s

Learn more about my 6-week interval bootcamp for workouts like these HERE!