Yesterday I told you about how I lowered my 12 minute workout time down to 8 minutes and 23 seconds in under a week by doing a modified version for a few days and then going back to it. Today I want to show you the simple modifications I made in order to accomplish that.
If you aren’t familiar with the simple 12 minute workout and don’t feel like checking it out, here are the cliff notes.
The workout is very simple and only consists of four exercises.
It starts off with 20 bodyweight squats followed immediately by 20 lunges. There are five sets of this, with a 15 second rest in between sets. After 5 sets, take a one minute rest before doing 50 pushups, then immediately follow that with a 30-second plank. That’s it. So in about 12 minutes you get in 100 squats, 100 lunges, 50 pushups, and a 30-second plank.
After working that down to 11 minutes I became determined to knock it down even further, so I decided to modify the workout for a few days into a harder version. When I was used to that, I came back to the original workout so I could easily kill my old records. Below is the modified workout I did, with almost everything the same but more pushups added throughout.
20 squats
25 pushups
20 lunges
15 second break
Do that 5 times just like before. At the end I did one more set of 25 pushups, then a 45-second plank.
I designed it this way because even though it was more work, it gave my legs a longer rest period. I never had to go from one leg exercise directly into the other with no rest like I did in the original workout, which made it easier to transition to the harder workout. I added those 25 pushups before I got my 15 second rests in though, so it was a lot more work that I had to recover from.
This had great carry over into the 12 minute workout, because I didn’t feel as though I needed much rest until I got toward the end of it. Plus because my chest was fresh at the end and I’d done so much less work, I only took about 10 seconds to rest at the end instead of the full minute. All of this allowed me to cut an amazing 3.5 minutes off my time over just a few days.
I implore you to try it out for yourself. If you can’t do the numbers above or you feel it’s not quite enough for you, adjust them to something more comfortable for you. If you have to do modified pushups against a wall or on your knees, that’s fine too.
The important thing is that you see for yourself exactly how this works to make quick improvements in your time, so that you can take this and apply it to other parts of your life.
Until next time,
Kris
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