The Women's Health Big Book of 15-Minute Workouts: A Leaner, Sexier, Healthier You--In 15 Minutes a Day! (2 page)

Free Minutes!

15 WAYS TO FIND 15 MINUTES FOR EXERCISE EVERY DAY! (DITCH THE STUFF THAT’S WASTING YOUR PRECIOUS TIME.)

1.
FLIP OFF FACEBOOK.
We now spend a whopping 7 hours a month on Facebook, according to Neilsen. Let’s do the math: Seven hours a month works out to 105 minutes each week or, hmmm, guess what, exactly 15 minutes every single day. You don’t have to banish FB from your life entirely, but limit it to two short sessions a day, like once in the morning over coffee and later in the evening. Then log out and stay off.

2.
SAY “NO!”
Women have a very hard time with this one. But we think you’ll really like it once you try it. Next time someone (not your big boss) asks you to do something you really don’t want or need to do, say, “I’m sorry. No. I just can’t,” and feel the freedom—and all that free time—wash over you.

3.
PLAN YOUR PEAKS.
We all have certain times of the day when we are most focused and productive. Schedule your biggest task for that time (for many people it’s in the morning, say 9:00 a.m.). You’ll get it done more quickly and efficiently than if you wait to tackle it during a natural low point (like midafternoon).

4.
DO ONE THING AT A TIME.
We pride ourselves on being supreme multi-taskers, but trying to do too many things at once means getting nothing done. Sit down with your to-do list. Pick an item, and do it and only it. You’ll be shocked by how quickly each task gets done when you give it your full energy and attention.

5.
RECORD YOUR SHOWS.
A typical hour-long TV show contains just 40 to 42 minutes of real content—the rest is commercials. Watch two shows and that’s 40 to 45 minutes you could have spent doing something else. It’s well worth investing in a digital TV recorder so you can watch just what you want when you want, and free up hours (and, by the end of the year, days) to pursue more healthful activities, like 15-minute workouts.

6.
DON’T BE A NEATNIK.
Is it really all that important that your apartment is spotless? Stop wasting precious time straightening your sheets just so and polishing picture frames, and aim for adequate instead.

7.
BE DECISIVE!
You can easily waste hours choosing what color to paint your walls or which brand of sneakers to buy (it’s called analysis paralysis). At some point, you need to stop waffling and move forward. Set a time limit, say 45 minutes, for comparison shopping, weighing pros and cons, etc., then make a decision and go forth.

8.
BUY TIME.
Yes, you actually can buy more hours in the day by paying for services that suck up tons of time. Before you pooh-pooh the idea of hiring a laundry or cleaning service, sit down and do a little math. What is an hour of your time worth? How do you spend your disposable income? When you consider that you might be blowing a few hundred bucks on shoes and bags you don’t really need while you slave away all your spare time scrubbing the tub, it’s time to reconsider your expenditures. Hire a cleaning service to do the heavy-duty stuff twice a month, look into premade meal plans, and buy yourself hours every week.

9.
INK IT ON YOUR CALENDAR.
Amazing how you find time for everything on your calendar, right? That’s because it’s there in black and white, demanding your attention (and time). Block out your workouts as you would work appointments and you won’t miss a one.

10.
USE AN EGG TIMER.
Certain activities are black holes for time. All the little things you plan to do for just a few minutes—surfing the Web, playing games on your phone, “window shopping” all the new apps for your iPhone or iPad—can suck away hours if you’re not careful. Keep an egg timer on your desk. When you sit down, set it for 15 or 20 minutes. Then shut down when the bell rings.

11.
TOUCH IT ONCE.
When a paper comes across your desk (or in the mail), deal with it immediately. Piling up stacks of paper not only creates distracting clutter, you also waste time revisiting each issue again (and again) or, worse, losing something important. (Try it with email too!)

12.
MAKE A CALL.
IM-ing and emailing can be great time-savers. But sometimes it takes 15 messages to accomplish what you could do in a 40-second phone call. As soon as it starts getting complicated, pick up the phone.

13.
PUT THINGS IN THEIR PLACES.
I used to waste minutes (hours…days) looking for my keys. At any given time they could have been anywhere, and I mean anywhere—coat pockets, drawers, messenger bags, the clothes dryer, my car, or my personal favorite, hanging from the door lock. Finally, I bought a 75-cent hook, hung it by the phone as my designated key spot, and have not lost my keys since. Try this trick with anything you lose regularly. It works.

14.
SET OUT YOUR STUFF.
This one is repeated more often than It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmastime, but it works. Setting out your exercise clothes at night makes it far more likely that you will get up and get moving for a morning workout, instead of hitting snooze (or worse, skipping the whole affair entirely) because it’s too daunting to get up and start rummaging around for your workout gear.

15.
GET UP 15 MINUTES EARLIER.
Ridiculously simple, right? Yep, and it works. Vow to get up and work out at 5 a.m. every day and you’ll never do it. But even the most nocturnal of night owls can set their alarms (and roll out of the sack) a mere 15 minutes earlier in the morning. Even if you don’t use that extra time for your workout, it gets you out the door and to your office earlier than usual, so you get more done earlier in the day. So you’re more likely to feel entitled to take that 15 minutes for yourself later in the day.

Chapter 1:

The Genius of the 15-Minute Training Plan

WHEN IT COMES TO EXERCISE, IT REALLY IS ABOUT QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY.

THE SUPERFAST WORKOUTS HELP YOU BECOME LEANER, SEXIER, AND HEALTHIER IN HALF THE TIME! AND THAT’S JUST PLAIN SMART.

In our
Biggest Loser
culture we have a tendency to believe that if a little exercise firms and burns,
a lot
of exercise will transform us into Victoria’s Secret models. Even though I’m a trainer and triathlete and I should know better, I’ve been guilty of buying in to this notion myself. A few years back, I laced up my running shoes and started hitting the street for an hour a day, believing that if only I sweated more, my skinny jeans, which were on the verge of becoming my asphyxiation jeans, would never get too snug. But to my dismay, I didn’t really get any leaner. I lost a little bulk, sure. But I also got softer, especially in my belly. Then a running coach gave me some advice that stuck (because it worked!): If you want to scorch calories and burn fat, go harder, not longer. I picked up the pace and haven’t looked back since.

The more-is-more mind-set is more than a waste of time; it also derails people from their fitness goals. If we think we have to do a ton to get results, we sometimes don’t exercise at all. It’s a mentality that sets us up for failure before we even start. As it turns out, it is far more important to know what kind of exercise to do rather than how long to do it for. Because much of what we think is going to make us thin or keep us fit actually does neither. Case in point, a study published in the
International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism
in which researchers asked a group of women to do 45 minutes of steady, moderate cardio exercise (like a brisk elliptical workout) 5 days a week for 12 weeks. The result? At the end of the study, the women experienced no change in their body composition compared with women who didn’t exercise or diet.

Depressing huh? Not at all. The good news is that you have permission to stop wasting your time. You can finally free yourself from marathon gym sessions. Instead scientists are now saying you can shed fat, firm trouble spots, boost your heart health, and fend off a host of ills, mental and physical, not by doing more, but by doing less. You can do this in as little as 15 minutes if you do the right exercises. But you needthe inside knowledge.

Short Workouts, Sweet Rewards

That’s exactly what you get with the
Women’s Health Big Book of 15-Minute Workouts
: a scientifically proven, insider shortcut to losing weight permanently. We’ve pooled all our expertise and pored over the latest research to create the Superfast Fitness Plan. At the heart of it is resistance training. Hands down, resistance training is the quickest way to burn fat and build a lean, beautiful body. When you create resistance—whether with weights or your own body—you cause microscopic tears in your muscle fibers, which sounds like a bad thing, but is actually the first step to slimming down and getting strong. This fiber breakdown speeds up a process called muscle protein synthesis that uses amino acids to repair and reinforce those fibers—and voilà, you’ve built some new muscle.

Muscle works magic in many ways. First, all that lifting and rebuilding burns calories not just while you’re exercising, but long after you’re done. Secondly, muscle is metabolically more active than fat, meaning it burns more calories just to sustain itself. Finally, being stronger makes you more active. Research finds that people are more spontaneously active when they start lifting weights because they’re stronger and even hard physical tasks suddenly feel easier. Worried that building muscle will make you bulky? Don’t be. A pound of muscle takes up 20 percent less space than a pound of fat. So you’ll actually be smaller, but stronger. Didn’t we tell you less is more?

The best part: You can get all these body-shaping benefits in no time—just 15 minutes is all it takes. How? We’ve condensed the workout by removing all the sitting around and resting between moves for a supereffective program. It’s not only time efficient, it also increases your energy expenditure both during and afterward. Researchers from Southern Illinois University recently found that one set of 10 reps of 10 exercises (which took 15 minutes to complete, by the way) raised resting energy expenditure (the calories you burn when you’re just sitting around) as much as three sets, which took the volunteers 35 minutes to do.

Finally, to turbocharge your results, we’ve added cardio to the mix. Not the 45-minutes-to-an-hour-a-day variety that may barely budge the scale, but the superfast-fat-burning variety, known in scientific circles as high-intensity interval training (or HIIT) that, like resistance training, builds muscle and burns fat fast. While the government keeps upping the ante on its cardio exercise recommendation—up a half hour from 60 minutes a day to 90 minutes a day for weight loss—a large and growing body of research is saying the opposite thing: that HIIT is drastically superior to regular cardio workouts in improving cardiovascular functioning, increasing insulin sensitivity, and, of course, burning calories. What determines whether or not you shed fat is not the duration of your workouts, but the intensity. In other words, it’ll take many hours to walk away that extra weight. But you can sprint it off in no time.

HIIT builds up lactic acid in your muscles because you’re working harder and faster than your body has a chance to clear it, which triggers a release of human growth hormone, a powerful natural elixir that promotes fat loss and may crank your metabolism to Maserati speed. And it works fast. Just 30 seconds of sprinting on a stationary bike is enough to send your levels of human growth hormone—that chemical that boosts lean muscle and burns fat—soaring by 530 percent. Another study, published in the
Journal of Applied Physiology,
reported that just 2 weeks of alternate-day interval training boosted eight active women’s fat-burning ability by 36 percent. Importantly, your metabolism stays elevated for far longer—up to 24 hours, burning up to 120 additional calories (twice as many as low-intensity exercise)—after a high-intensity workout, so you see results fast.

All that fat burning translates into a leaner you in half the workout time. In a study of 18 women, Australian researchers found that those who performed superfast fat burning workouts that included 8-second sprints followed by 12 seconds of recovery 3 days a week lost about 5½ pounds during the study period while a similar group who pedaled twice as long at an average pace actually gained a pound of fat over the same period. Even better, the weight you lose is pure fat. In one study from Laval University, researchers found that even when HIIT exercisers burned half as many calories during their actual workout sessions, they still lost nine times more fat after 15 weeks of working out than their traditional long-cardio-bout peers did after 20 weeks.