Hark unto a true story:
I got into higher density lifting pretty much by accident.
It was something I’d dabbled with in the past (an unsuccessful foray into Vince Gironda’s 8×8 system being just one example), but I could never quite get it to “stick”, so would rapidly slip back into my usual mode of training (mostly a small number of heavy, low-ish rep sets with long rest periods).
What changed?
Jess fell pregnant with Lily, meaning we would soon become proud parents to three children under the age of five. So in response to that, I completely unconsciously started reducing my rest periods between sets, spurred by a desire to be around more.
Results followed quickly, at least in the aesthetics department. (I lost an average of 20% in terms of the weight I was shifting, but regained this steadily over subsequent months.)
But more importantly than that, the added demand of curtailing my rest periods significantly made it so I actually felt like I was properly training again for the first time in far too long.
Anyone who has been reading my stuff for more than five minutes knows I loathe what I have named the “exercise experience” – aiming to get hot, sweaty, and sore mistakenly believing it’s hardcore or that a workout “doesn’t count” if you leave the gym feeling better than you did when you walked in.
However, this was different.
Every week, I’d manage one or a combination of more weight, more reps, and more sets.
And…
My workouts kept getting shorter and shorter.
It got to the point that I could happily complete a 25ish set workout in the time it took Jess and our now three kiddos to do our Saturday top-up shop (we’d walk to town as a family, I’d then break off to go and lift, then we’d meet back up and Jess would hand me an energy drink to slurp on the way home).
So.
If you like the idea of slashing (potentially quite significantly) the duration of your workouts without compromising (and hopefully improving) their effectiveness, subscribe to my “The Phil Tyreman Letter” before the deadline on Wednesday the 30th.
You’ll find all the details about what you’ll get as a subscriber here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman