Don’t quit, you’ve got time!
by Michael Ray Baggett

Sometimes training along with the stresses of family and job take their toll on us.  Recently, I’ve been so spread out with training, preaching, heading a committee, and doing special on the job training for other staff that I have become exhausted.   However, I’ve already had a break from training and this is no time to quit!  Maybe you feel the crunch of time or you just don’t feel up to doing an hours worth of training even three times a week.  The following has helped get me back on course these days.

Twenty-minutes.  We spend twenty-minutes in the shower or tub, waiting on a bus, eating a meal.  The point is twenty-minutes is not much time.  Yet, if we divide our training into twenty -minute sessions we can get a lot of training in during the week!  When things start to look overwhelming “divide and conquer.”

The divide and conquer style training is not just another simple split-routine.  It involves a split-routine, taking each set to failure because it is low sets, and the training involves intense sessions of only twenty-minutes.  This is a great plan if you feel like you’re going to pass out at the 40 minute mark of your regular routine.  It could be just the thing to get you through the hard times or it could be just the
thing!

I’m using the following split:  session one:  legs, calves, low-back; session two:  lats and bi’s;  session three:  chest, delts and tri’s.  I start the clock with the very first set so I spend a little time before I train arranging weights and setting up to train the body parts.  I don’t have time to waste when I’m limiting the session to twenty-minutes. The first body part in the split gets most of the work.  You can arrange the body parts to your liking. I do abs and stretching at other times, namely, when I’m watching T.V.!  You see, when you divide and conquer you find you can do more sessions and it’s fun because you know in the back of your mind, “hey, this is only twenty-minutes.”   You can use these splits the way that works best for you.  Afterall, you know your body better than anyone else.  I am training session one in the morning, session two in the late  afternoon, and session three some time the next day.  I take a whole day off, then repeat the process.  This may prove to be too much over time. You might want to do this routine in a three-day-on-one-day-off style.
If you are the super hardgainer, you might do it M-W-F style and do abs and stretching and aerobics (if you need them) on the days off.

Anyway, it’s not a perfect routine but it might can be tweeked to the point you find yourself not only enjoying your training more with less exhaustion, but may actually be training more than you did before because now you don’t think in a negative way about the time involved!