I’ll be honest, the vast majority of my training sessions last more than 15 minutes. But when I’m pressed for time and want to get some sort of work in, I’ll bang out a short (but intense) workout to tide me over until I have more time available either later that day or the next day.

My go-to time-saving workout these days is a concept I recently came up with and that I plan to develop into a full program at some point in the near future. The concept is a full-body lifting workout incorporating three sets each of three different exercises – one for the chest, one for the back, one for the legs. If all three exercises are compound moves, you’ve more or less hit all the major muscle groups in the body just like that.

The workout is set up as a circuit of three exercises, where you’ll go through the circuit three times (three sets per exercise, nine sets total for the workout). You’ll start out light (15 reps per exercise), then go heavier in subsequent rounds (10 reps in round two, five reps in round three). In each round, make sure you’re choosing a challenging weight – one that will elicit muscle failure at the prescribed rep count (15, 10 or 5).

The one twist to it is this: in the third (and last) round, after doing five reps with a heavy weight, you’ll do two drop sets immediately after that – the first with the same weight you used for 10 reps in round two, and the second with the weight you used in round one for 15 reps. By this last round, you probably won’t be able to get 10 and 15 reps with these lighter weights, but that’s okay. Just go to failure. Do these drop sets for all three exercises in that last round.

The objective of the workout is to rest as little as possible between sets – basically, try to rest only as long as it takes to move to and set up for the next exercise. To that end, your goal is to complete all three rounds in under 15 minutes.

As for exercise selection, feel free to choose whatever chest, back and legs exercises you like. My one suggestion is to pick multi-joint movements that will provide the biggest bang for your buck – for example, a flat-bench or incline press for chest; rows, lat pulldowns or pull-ups for back; and some version of squat, lunge or step-up for legs. Use compound moves like this and you’ll be burning the most calories and stimulating the most muscle possible in the short sub-15-minute workout.

For your convenience, I put together a sample workout for you to try. Again, feel free to substitute in your preferred multi-joint back, chest and/or leg workout if you like.

Here’s the routine:

Done!

Good luck in your training, everyone! Stay JYM Army Strong!

Jim