Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I build Evolo. Evolo is science-back strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evolo now for two weeks free if you visit evlofitness.com. Welcome to the Dr. Shannon Show, body recomposition capsule. There's so much fitness advice out there, and quite frankly, much of it isn't true. So in this 10 episode series, we're covering all the science-based tools for body recomposition. You may have heard me cover many of these topics before, and some things will be brand new. I wanted to create one organized capsule of information that will give you all the important concepts for improving your body composition, because we know improving your body composition isn't just external. It has incredible benefits for your health, energy, mood, and longevity. I'm your host, Shannon Richie. Welcome to the show.!!!! Hi everyone. To this point, we've talked about the strength training dosage required for body recomposition. In a couple of episodes, we'll talk about the cardio dosage that's required for body recomposition, but I'll just give it to you quickly here. So we want at least 150 minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio. You may be thinking that's a lot of exercise, but there are ways to make your strength training sessions more efficient while still getting in sufficient volume and frequency that we talked about in last episode. So today, we'll talk about how to make your strength sessions shorter, but still with sufficient volume, how to combine cardio into your strength workouts, and common mistakes to avoid when trying to make your workouts more efficient. So first, let's discuss how to make your strength workouts shorter while still getting in sufficient volume. So your strength workouts can easily be under an hour. In fact, most of our classes are 35 minutes, and that's because we use a version of supersets. So what are supersets? First of all, rest between sets of an exercise is important. Research shows that resting at least one to two minutes between challenging sets generally supports better performance and hypertrophy or muscle growth with slightly longer rest, so anywhere from like two to three minutes in between exercises, sometimes offering a small edge. So doing, let's say, three glute exercises back to back to back with no rest in between would seem like it's efficient. You're getting it all done, but it actually isn't very effective. Since you want to train close to failure to stimulate muscle growth, if you were doing back to back to back exercises, you're never training with enough intensity to reach that muscle failure point. You want to make sure that you're reaching larger muscle fibers in each set of each exercise, and those fibers need time to recover. So if you're working the same muscle group back to back to back, even if it's a different exercise, you're likely working harder for a smaller payoff. But if you can do lifting exercises back to back by using supersets and working different muscle groups, you don't have to completely rest in between each exercise or in between each set. So a superset is when instead of just resting in between your sets, you work a different muscle group while the one you just worked rests. For example, we do this in airflow. So maybe we'll do lunges, then while glutes are resting, we'll work chest and we'll do chest presses. And then while glutes and chest are resting, we do a ball crunch. And then by the time we get back to lunges, your glutes have gotten plenty of rest, a few minutes of rest. Now, what does the science say about this? A 2025 randomized control trial compared straight sets. So straight sets are sets where you do a set, rest, like let's say you're doing lunges. Lunges, rest for a couple of minutes, do another set, rest for a couple of minutes. So they compared that to supersets in 43 resistance-trained adults, both male and female, over eight weeks. What they found is that both groups did the same exercises, the same sets and reps taken close to failure. The only difference was the rest structure. So one group did straight sets and one group did supersets. Muscle growth was virtually identical between the two groups. Strength improvements were similar. And the superset group reduced workout duration by about 36%. The takeaway is that supersets are a time efficient alternative to traditional sets without compromising muscle growth. So that's why we do supersets in all of our airflow classes. Next, let's talk about how to combine your strength with your cardio. Some people like to consolidate all of their training into a few sessions per week, which is totally fine. If you want to get your cardio and strength training done in the same workout, you can absolutely do this. But I recommend doing your strength training first, then do your cardio afterwards, because when we are strength training, we want mechanical tension to be the priority. And so we don't want cardio to influence the amount of mechanical tension that you're able to tolerate. If you do a lot of cardio prior to your strength training session, you're bringing fatigue into your strength training session. So your strength training session just isn't as potent and effective. So do cardio after strength. I talked to someone this past weekend who said that between her strength exercises, so in between her sets at the gym, she'll do burpees or jumping jacks or jump rope to try to burn more calories in between her sets instead of just resting. And I think this is super common to try to make the most of your workouts. And it's not that you won't see results from doing that, but it just doesn't have the payoff that people think it does. When you turn your rest periods into cardio, you create systemic fatigue. That fatigue reduces how heavy you can lift in the next set and how close you can get to true muscular failure. Over time, this means less mechanical tension, which is the primary driver of hypertrophy or muscle growth. Plus, the extra calories that you burn from those burpees or jumping rope are really marginal compared to what you gain by stimulating muscle. Muscle increases metabolic rate, improves your glucose disposal, changes the shape of your body, and contributes to long-term weight maintenance. So if your goal is to change your body composition, you want to be strategic about where you place your cardio so it doesn't influence performance in your strength training sessions. Next, let's talk about mistakes that people make when trying to make their workouts shorter. So mistake number one is poor exercise selection. Many people gravitate towards movements that look athletic or feel really hard and have a lot going on. Think like a squat to an overhead press or burpees or glute kickbacks with tricep kickbacks at the same time. And these combination movements distribute effort across many muscles without applying enough mechanical tension to target the tissue needed for growth. You end up sweating and working really hard, but you don't stimulate much muscle growth. Muscles grow the best when they are loaded through a stable range of motion and taken to failure, not when you just choose movements that elevate your heart rate. In other words, when you choose combination movements that have a lot going on, you aren't stopped because a muscle reaches failure, you're stopped because of overall fatigue. So choosing fewer, better exercises is one of the fastest ways to reduce workout time while improving results. So think chest presses over burpee pushups or hip thrusts over squat, upper body combinations or rows instead of renegade rows. Mistake number two is thinking that overly fatiguing workouts are better. Fatigue can actually lower your intensity. Muscle growth requires tension and tension requires force. Anything that lowers your ability to produce force, like performing strength work while out of breath or performing your strength workout when you're under fueled or doing cardio between sets, those things will lower the muscle stimulus. This is why fatigue management is one of the most overlooked components of efficient training. When your workouts are structured in a way that creates systemic fatigue, like lots of jumping or doing exercises on unstable surfaces or doing lots of combination moves or overly taxing movements done back to back, your intensity and your reps will suffer. Efficient training reduces unnecessary fatigue so that you can direct your energy towards the muscle that you're trying to grow. So that means really stable setups. We like to use a wall, a chair, a pillow, the floor using predictable resistance patterns or doing the same movements and giving yourself enough recovery both in the workout itself and in between workouts to maintain really high output. So managing fatigue allows you to get more stimulus with fewer sets, which saves time and produces better results. So don't think that just because something is more fatiguing that it's necessarily better or superior for results. And the final mistake is doing full body workouts every single day. One of the biggest mistakes is designing workouts that train every muscle group in every session. So if you're doing six workouts over the week and you're working every single muscle group in all six of those workouts, not only is this inefficient, but it also contradicts what we know about hypertrophy. Muscles grow best when you provide repeated, targeted stimulation with adequate recovery in between, 48 hours in between when you work a muscle to when you work it the next time, not when you train muscles every single day. These everything workouts don't actually allow you to hit the intensities required for muscle growth because you never really recover between sessions. Efficiency means prioritizing, not doing everything. So pick a few muscles to emphasize in a session. This allows you to apply enough tension and volume to make progress. It also aligns with how the best hypertrophy programs in the literature are structured. So targeted, not maximalist. To summarize this episode on how to make your workouts more efficient. When your workouts include the variables we know support muscle growth, they don't have to be super long. Train close to failure anywhere from four-ish to 30-ish rep range or roughly 20 to 70 seconds if you're using tension or if you're doing isometrics or slower reps. Use super sets to strategically save time, remove cardio during rest periods, and don't try to work everything in the same exercise. Tomorrow we are finally talking about nutrition for body recomposition. I'll see you tomorrow.
