Is strength training useful for half an hour

Of course it is useful. The core is never how long you have spent on training, but how much actual and effective training time you have in these half an hour.

Xiao Zhou, a programmer I met before, couldn't squeeze out a lot of free time in the 996 work and rest. The annual fitness card he had previously applied for could not go five times a year. Last year, he started to split the one hour lunch break into three parts: 20 minutes to eat a quick snack, half an hour to soak in the gym downstairs of the company, and 10 minutes to shower, change clothes and return to the workstation. Every time he went there, he didn't do anything fancy. He just focused on the parts he wanted to train that day and chose two or three compound movements. He rested strictly for 45 seconds to 1 minute between sets. He locked his phone in the locker and never touched it. After three months, his shoulders and back were straight. The lumbar pain he had suffered from sitting for a long time was mostly relieved. The bench press weight increased from an empty bar to being able to push 60kg in a set. The effect was much better than the two hours of random training he had done on weekends.

Some people must think this statement is too exaggerated. My fellow bodybuilders who have been practicing for five or six years always say that they can’t even feel a pump in half an hour, and that all the training is in vain. This is actually true, it depends on what your training goals are. If you are running for a bodybuilding competition, and you need to nail every muscle detail of your chest, shoulders, back, and arms, and wait for your heart rate to completely drop between sets to hit the maximum weight, let alone half an hour, even one and a half hours may not be enough. But for the 90% of ordinary people who just want to gain some muscle, reduce some body fat, and improve their physical fitness, an efficient half-hour training is really more than enough.

After all, multi-joint compound movements can cover most of the muscle groups at one time. If you arrange it properly, a 25-minute formal group can fit into 6 to 8 sets of sufficient capacity training, which can fully stimulate the muscles. Many people take photos for half an hour as soon as they arrive at the gym, and scroll through Douyin for three to five minutes between sets. If they say they have practiced for an hour and a half, the effective training time may not be more than 20 minutes. After practicing for half a year, they are not as effective as others who practiced for three months. Isn’t this a waste of time?

To put it bluntly, this matter is similar to preparing for exams in school. Some people sit in the study room for a whole day and fish in a daze for half of the time. It is not as good as others who concentrate on studying for two hours before the exam. The duration of training is always taken for your circle of friends to see. Whether your muscles have received enough stimulation is something that truly belongs to you.

You really don’t need to be kidnapped by the saying on the Internet that “you must practice for an hour at a time to be called fitness.” If you really can’t spare a large amount of time, start with half an hour of efficient training. Training that you can persist in is really useful training, right?