What Is A Good Exercise Plan If I Have Only 30 Minutes A Day To Workout?

A good exercise plan is one that you can incorporate into your lifestyle with little risk of abandoning your intentions. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends daily exercise including resistance and cardiovascular workouts to prevent chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Exercising 30 minutes per day at moderate to high intensities is sufficient to improve your fitness.

Resistance Training

Incorporating a resistance training program three days a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays is quite ideal. In 30 minutes, you can work two to three muscle groups, performing three sets of three exercises per muscle group to tone your muscles or slightly increase their mass. Work the larger muscles of your upper body, your chest and back on Mondays. Your legs and shoulders should be trained on Wednesdays. Exercising your biceps, triceps and abdominals on Fridays gives your arm muscles time to recuperate from your chest and back workout.

The key for this type of resistance training is to do the exercises as supersets. This means you must pair one chest exercise with one back exercise, alternating one set of each exercise for three rounds. Use supersets for your Wednesday and Friday workouts as well.

Cardio

Cardiovascular exercises should be on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. You may incorporate a different type of exercise machine on each day. Or, if you enjoy running you may do a different type of treadmill workout each day. For instance, on Tuesdays you should run nonstop for 20 to 30 minutes after a quick warm-up. On Thursdays, consider running up a high incline for 30 seconds then walking on a lower incline for two minutes totaling 30 minutes. On Saturdays, sprint all out on a one percent incline for 30 seconds and walk for 90 seconds totaling 20 to 30 minutes. You can do this type of training around your neighborhood as well, saving on travel time.

Flexibility

Stretching exercises are best done after an aerobic workout, especially stretching your leg muscles. Additionally, consider taking a few minutes to stretch your muscles after a resistance training workout, especially your upper body muscles. Your muscles will become very tight if you do not stretch them and you will lose the range of motion in your joints.

Considerations

Take Sundays off any exercise, short of a slow walk with the family around the neighborhood. Your muscles, bones and joints do need a day of rest, reducing the risk of overtraining and injury. Short, intense workouts such as sprint intervals do place a tremendous amount of stress on your joints. Keep a workout log so you can change your plan every six to eight weeks, preventing training plateaus while continuing to exercise 30 minutes a day, six days a week.