This is the most time-efficient training technique

Time is the ultimate finite resource. Time is precious. Time is money.

But time is what it takes to build a great physique. So let's talk about how to save some of that time. In this video I'm going to share with you my #1 strategy that helped me reduce my workouts to less than 45 minutes per session, or even 30 minutes if I don't have squats or deadlifts in them.

The most popular time-saving technique is probably supersets where you string 2 exercises together and perform them back to back. And if you do 3 of them together, you do tri-sets and if you do 4 we call it quad-sets, and if you do more than that, usually we start calling it circuit training because most people don't know what the word is for 5. All of these techniques have been studied extensively in research and the findings are very easy to summarize: You save a crap lot of time.

If you pair or superset two exercises together, if you logically think about it, it will cut your workout time in approximately half because now if you do squats and bench press right after each other instead of just squats-rest-squats-rest, you do 2 exercises for the time of 1 essentially. If you do 3 of them together you can even cut your workouts into a third and generally these studies find that you get the same gains. So you save a lot of time, you get the same gains, you get the same performance, same muscle activity, same force output, same muscle growth over the long run, same strength development.

This has been found in multiple studies. However, many people have found that when they do this themselves, as opposed to in studies, where they often get verbally encouraged and there's a bit more pressure to perform well, you start either slacking off or your performance is not quite the same, especially when you start supersetting things like squats and bench presses. It's just too taxing.

The cardiovascular stress, the cardio respiratory stress. You're too out of breath after a set of squats to immediately drop down to the bench press and do the 10RM and really get all of those 10 reps out. Most people cannot manage that.

Accordingly, some studies indeed show that when you superset or pair up exercises that are either more high repetition or more compound in nature, so they involve more muscle groups, your performance does suffer and long term gains also suffer. Interestingly, it's mostly strength gains that suffer. Muscle growth, in research, is generally not statistically significantly worse.

So even if your performance suffers it might still be very time efficient, it might still be worth it. Fortunately, there is a solution that gets the best of both worlds where you don't have to kill yourself and make your workout feel like cardio, you still save a lot of time and your gains will be the same. That method is what I call “Combo sets”.

A combo set is essentially a circuit, or a quad set, or a tri set, depending on how many exercises you combine, but instead of doing them all back to back immediately after each other you do catch your breath in between sets. So you do, for example, a set of squats, you catch your breath, in the same squat rack you do a set of chinups, you catch your breath, in the same squat rack you take off some of the weights, you do a set of barbell overhead press, and you catch your breath again, then you rest as long as needed to go back to the squat and that's what we would call a combo set. Now when I tell this to my students many of them wonder: “How are you still saving time if you are resting in between your sets?

Isn't the whole point that you are just resting less with the super sets? ” No. Supersets don't save you time just because you're restless, that's one part of it, but it's not the most important part.

The most important part is that you have overlapping rest intervals. So now when you're resting in that combo set, you are essentially resting delts for the overall press, your resting your back for your chin ups, you're resting the legs for the squats. So all of these muscle groups are using the same time to rest.

And, accordingly, you can do a combo set like that with 3 exercises where you do all of them together, and that set will take, you know, about 1, maybe 2 minutes extra compared to just doing the squats. But in return you do 3 exercises instead of just the squats. So normally what you see with a lot of people is that their squats alone take them 15-20 minutes.

In that same time you could easily fit in 1 or 2 extra exercises. It's a little bit more effort, but honestly, even not that much because most people. .

. it's just the squats that take so much out of them and require so much rest before they can do squats again, that takes up so much time. But in that time you could at least do, for example, if you don't want to do chin ups, you can do biceps curls or overhead triceps extensions or something like that that doesn't have the same cardiovascular stress.

I also like combining squats with leg curls. Interestingly, that doesn't seem to hurt performance at all and for some people even makes it feel better on their knees, especially if you do the leg curls before the squats. Importantly, the combo should not involve significant overlapping musculature.

Leg curls and squats, they work because, unlike what many people think, squats don't drain the hamstrings. They're really, really poor hamstring exercise. I'm not going to go into the biomechanics of that in this video, you can just test this for yourself and see that if you do leg curls before squats, your squat performance generally does not suffer.

For some people it even improves because their knees feel better. They feel like it's easier to get to full depth and can be some improvement as well due to antagonist potentiation from the fatigue of the hamstrings. That aside, for most purposes you want your combo sets to involve completely different muscle groups.

That's why in my example I had chin-ups, overhead press and squats together. That's pretty much a full body combo. And they’re all different body parts that you hit.

If you have overlapping musculature, of course, then performance will suffer because if you do together, for example, triceps extensions, front raises and bench press, then you have very overlapping musculature and those isolation exercises will reduce the performance of the bench press and vice versa. Research is very clear that combo sets like this don't hurt performance. For example, we have a nice study by García-Orea et al.

which found muscle growth and strength development were the same in people that comboed up squats and bench presses with 45 seconds of rest in between sets, so not a true superset, but quite close to it would be a combo set and the workout time was cut approximately in half. Another benefit of combo sets is that they allow you to prioritize multiple exercises at the same time. Typically, at the start of a workout, people are more fresh they’re more motivated and they're less fatigued so their performance on earlier exercises is a little bit better.

The effect is not nearly as large as most people think unless your motivation just dwindles, but for most people there is some difference between their first and their last exercise even if it's only just in how much mental effort you can put into that exercise. The nice thing about combo sets is that they allow you to put multiple exercises, like chin up, squats and overhead press, together and you give them roughly equal priority. So that it's not the case that after you've done 20 minutes of squatting you get to your chin ups and your chin ups will be a little bit lackluster.

With a combo set your first set of chin ups is after just one set of squatting in this example, so you will give it a lot of effort and you'll be able to spread your effort more equally across the different exercises in your program. At this point, you may be wondering: “Okay, Menno, cool story. .

. Lots of benefits. .

. But, bro, I train in a very crowded gym and I cannot be that guy that hoggs multiple pieces of equipment. It's nice maybe that you can do this in a squat rack for some niche exercises if you do full body training, but how about in real world settings where it's different?

” Well, the nice thing about combo sets is that you can be entirely flexible with them. Unlike most supersets and circuits where the order is very set, at least that's the way most people do them, with a combo set, you can think of it roughly as a group of exercises in the combo, together, with non-overlapping musculature, that you can do in any order that you want. So for example if you want to combo together leg curls, squats and bench presses, what you can do is: you come to the gym, you see if the leg curl is available, and this is exactly how I train, by the way.

I literally come to the gym, see what the availabilities of all the exercises. I just do the first one that's available. So let's say leg curls are not available.

Okay. Then I move to the squats. I start squatting.

For squat rack you do need to hog the squat rack. So you leave your stuff there and then you can see in between your sets can you quickly sneak in a set of leg curls or maybe even bench press. Especially if you can work in with somebody else you can very often structure your workouts in a way that you do have some of the combo sets.

And then, worst case scenario, if there’s somebody on the bench press and the leg curl the whole session or you just can't leave the squat rack, worst case scenario, you're back to straight sets. So there's no downside. And sometimes you can sneak in the sets of the bench presses and let curls and that's fine.

And if you finish all the squat sets and then you still have to do the bench press and leg curl you can still combo those together. That's also fine. You can be entirely flexible with the order.

I see so many people wasting so much time because they are just stuck in this idea that this is the order of the session and it has to be like this. And there's simply no reason to be that anal about it. When you first start implementing combo sets you'll notice that the workout may feel a little bit harder.

You save a lot of time, but you have to put a little bit more effort into it. That's mostly the cardiovascular or cardio respiratory stress. For me, I can do my workouts in 30 to 45 minutes.

I benefit from the conditioning I have since I started kickboxing. Most individuals, it's pretty reasonable to fit in about 20 sets in 45 minutes in my experience, if you are diligent with doing the combo sets. Try to work in with other people, try to combo up as much as possible, but be flexible and if you cannot do it then you can't.

There's no downside, so you can always try to do the combo sets and organize your program in such a way that you at least try to do the combo sets. Over time your conditioning will improve. It will be easier to combo everything together with very minimal rest periods to the point even that if your conditioning is very good, you literally just catch your breath for a couple seconds, especially for isolation exercises.

So in my program, for example, I have a combo set of lat prayers, Bayesian flies, Bayesian curls, and lateral raises. And I do all of that back to back, literally no rest. You should be able to work up to that level of conditioning and that really saves a ton of time.

So give combo sets a try. Let me know how it goes. I hope it saves you a lot of time.

It is all I'm going to say about it because I don't want to use up more of your time. If you like this video, you're probably a serious lifter that appreciates science, just like me. You'll probably also like my online courses then.

For fitness professionals I have the Henselmans Personal Trainer Certification course. For non-professionals, my Personal Development Course will teach you everything you need to know to reach your maximum natural muscular potential at a sustainably low body fat percentage. Moreover, I'll cover how to optimize your lifestyle to be happy and fulfilled.

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I hope you'll enjoy it.