I know I’m not the only person with exercise equipment an arm’s reach (or a short walk) from where they spend most of their day. And you can pop down to your home gym a couple times a day, is that better than doing a whole workout all at once? Or if not better, is it just as good? Sometimes it is! Let’s discuss the nuances.
A traditional strength workout, where you warm up and then do four or five different exercises, with several sets of each. The whole thing might take you anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on what you’re doing and how much.
Working out for 15 minuted probably sounds a lot less intimidating than a whole workout, and that's likely the most obvious benefit to breaking up your workout. For people with busy or unpredictable schedules (say, someone with a taxing job, or parents with a new baby), it may be easier to find a few small chunks of time to exercise rather than to schedule in a full-length workout.
Each mini-workout is less intimidating, since it will be over in a few minutes.
You'll get a few mental and physical breaks from your workday (which is healthy if you normally spend the day sitting at a desk).
The downsides of spreading your workout throughout the day
Those benefits sound great, but there are some pretty significant downsides to splitting up a workout, depending on what kind of workout you’re doing. Most people will probably conclude it’s not worth it for these five reasons:
You'll approach each exercise cold, instead of still being warmed up from the previous one. Warmups aren’t always necessary, but they can help a lot to prepare you, especially for a good strength session.
You'll spend most of the day knowing that you have another workout coming up, rather than getting it over with early.
Aside from that last point, which only applies to those workouts designed to work as a sequence, most of the reasons for choosing one option over the other come down to time management. Do you think you’ll be more likely or less likely to do four mini workouts than one big one? Are you OK with the tradeoffs—perhaps spending more total time warming up or cleaning up—if they mean you never have to dedicate your entire lunch break to exercise? That’s a decision only you can make.
A lot of recent research has considered ways to get people to exercise more to improve their health. One study had older adults do a 10-minute, no-equipment workout twice a day. The exercises included standing up from a chair over and over, marching in place, and doing calf raises.
Whether the same strategy works for more athletic people doing work with weights would require more specific study, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it works.
Mini workouts like “greasing the groove” can improve strength
Many people have found this helped them get better at the exercise, likely for two main reasons. One is volume: two pullups an hour for six hours is 12 reps of pullups. Do that every day, and you’ll have done 60 reps during the work week, more than if you just did three sets of five pullups on two or three workout days. Each set might be easy, but they add up.
What happened when I tried splitting up my own workouts
That's a lot of theory. How does this work in practice? I gave it a try myself, and I have two stories to share.
I swear my shoulders feel healthier, and I know I’ve gotten better at this particular exercise. A few months ago, 24 kilograms was a tough weight for me to bent press, so my daily bent presses were with 20 kilograms, one rep at a time. These days, I do 24 for an easy double, three times a day, no warmup required.
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This is a workout that I normally find pretty intimidating, because it can end up taking a while. (It involves eight sets of pull-ups and dips. I mean, come on.) But taking it on one piece at a time, it didn’t seem nearly so bad—I can handle eight sets of pull-ups and dips if I’m not doing another hard exercise right before and right after.
That said, I did run into one of the problems noted above: I had to say “yes” to the workout four different times. And at the end of the day, I said “no” to the last part: a 15-minute circuit of core exercises. I had split everything up already, so what would it hurt to do the circuit the next morning? But today is "the next morning," and I still haven’t done it. I’ll get around to it later. Maybe. Probably. After today’s workout.
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