15-Minute Quick Workout for Busy People at Home

A 15 minute home workout is a simple way to stay fit while doing it from home and without having to change your current routines significantly. Many fitness experts and health/nutrition agencies now believe that by performing a variety of short (less than 20 minutes) workouts regularly, you can still receive the many positive health benefits that come from participating in these types of activities.

Research indicates that, for example, even small amounts of physical activity each day can improve your cardiovascular system (heart), metabolic rate (calories burned), and overall mental well-being. There are many people that feel only a long workout can produce results. This simply is not true.

Why Short Workouts Work

Short workouts can also be successful, if they include abs bodyweight exercise types (total body movements) and high-intensity cardiorespiratory (cardio) type exercise. This is why short workouts work well for busy individuals.

Scientific Studies Supporting Short Exercise

Therefore, there is scientific evidence to support the fact that short workouts are not only convenient but that they also provide significant benefits.

Improve heart condition
Build muscle

The Ideal 15-Minute Home Workout

A perfect 15 minute workout includes 5-10 minutes for a warm up1 of some sort, followed by a variety of either strength training and/or aerobic exercises that utilise compound movements (i.e., exercises that involve your centre of mass and use several muscle groups simultaneously). This lets you perform more muscle group workouts quicker and thus get a more efficient total workout.

The structure of a 15-minute workout is as follows:

3-minutes of warming-up
10-minutes performing full body exercises
2-minutes for stretching

An example of simple at-home workout

An example of simple at-home workout with little or no equipment that can be done by people of all fitness levels or busy professionals is a basic body weight workout and can include:

Squats: 1 minute
Plank: 1 minute
Lunges: 1 minute
Repeat this entire cycle two times.

Why This Routine Will Work

This routine will work because it consists of a combination of strength training and cardiovascular exercise. Strength training works on building muscle and cardiovascular training burns calories and helps improve heart function.

By combining both types of training, you will increase your overall level of fitness, endurance and fat- burning in a very short period. Full body circuits are suggested by many fitness experts for anyone with limited time who wants effective workouts at home.

Don’t Skip Your Warm-Up

A lot of people skip their warm-up, thinking that since they are doing only 15-minutes of exercise, there is no need for a warm-up. Warm-up is a hot topic in fitness as it is too essential for both injury prevention and performance.

A good warm-up condition’s your muscles, joints and heart for the physical activity. Warming up decreases your risk of injury and helps prevent muscle soreness after you finish exercising.

Examples of warm-up movements include:

Arm circles
High knees

All of these activities help prepare the legs, arms, & heart for the following workout. As you are warming up your body, continuously move around; do not remain stationary while performing your warm-ups.

Keep the intensity of your movements lower than the highest intensity level you will reach during your workout until your body is prepared for the increased intensity of your workout.

Best Compound Exercises for All-around Body Conditioning

Total body exercise can be used during short/easy workout sessions, since multiple muscle groups are being utilized at once; total-body exercises enable your body to burn the calorie equivalent of a greater amount of work accomplished during your workout.

When using compound exercises, the total amount of improvement you achieve in developing strength and cardiovascular fitness is much greater than you will achieve with individual muscle group exercises.

How to Do a Total Body Workout

The most effective method to achieve a total-body workout is by utilizing the circuit training method (perform the maximum number of repetitions for a given exercise prior to moving to the second exercise and continuing in this manner with minimal rest between exercises).

An example of using this Method would be for each exercise (30 seconds of work) complete two or three sets of the circuit. This format will allow you to go through multiple muscle groups in a limited number of rest periods; and keep your heart rate up at a higher level than normal allows you to burn fat and improve stamina.

Fat Loss/Circulatory Cardio Exercises

In a 15-minute workout the majority of time should be allotted to cardiovascular exercise – increasing your heart rate, while burning body calories as quickly as possible. Cardiovascular exercises will improve your heart health, increase your stamina and lung capacity.

There is much evidence from trainers, organizations like the World Health Organization, regarding the recommendation of doing short cardio sessions at least each week, in order to improve one’s general health and decrease the occurrence of developing lifestyle-related illnesses.

Top Cardio Workouts to Do at Home

Jumping jacks
High knees
Mountain climbers
Burpees

These types of workouts will build your heart rate up rapidly and help you shed fat. They can be included in quick workouts because of their ability to produce the greatest results in a very short amount of time.

Bodyweight Strength Training

However, you can effectively train for strength by utilizing your body’s weight as resistance. Examples of exercises that use your body’s weight for resistance include push-ups, squats, and planks, and when performed consistently, can create significant increases in your strength level.

Another advantage to strength-based training is that you will continue to burn fat after you are done working out because of the energy needed for muscle tissue maintenance. Over time, strength training, when incorporated into your exercise program, will help to improve your posture, strengthen your bones, and improve your overall functional ability for physical tasks that you have to perform in your daily life.

Making Short Workouts Consistent

You cannot rely upon motivation every day as motivation is constantly changing. Motivation isn’t as important as a habit or a routine when it comes to developing your own exercise habits.

Tips for helping you create healthy exercise habits:

Set a regular workout time.
Have your clothes ready to exercise.
Track what you have done.
Start with small goals.

Once you create a workout habit through these little steps you will be able to sustain it and continue to develop.

How to create a workout habit

Developing your exercise habit takes some time; however once you have created an exercise routine, it will be integrated into your daily routine, will become easier and more automatic. You should not need to spend a lot of time thinking about whether or not you should be exercising before you get started.

Begin with a minimum of fifteen minutes per day, and focus on developing consistency in your exercise rather than on developing the ‘perfect’ workout. If you happen to miss a day of working out, that is acceptable. Just do not let it be more than one or two days in a row.

Avoid these common mistakes to get the best results from short workouts

Short workouts take about 15 minutes to do but the majority of people do not get the results they want because of the following common mistakes.

Likewise, a lot of people do not perform their warm-ups and/or stretches before they start exercising and end up injuring themselves. Another major common mistake is exercising too quickly with poor form. This will decrease the effectiveness of working out.

A majority of individuals will also repeat the same routine for a period of time, however, as with everything in life, one should try to incorporate variety into their exercise program or keep increasing the intensity of the exercises you are doing. Taking rest days is also an essential part of developing and recovering muscles.

Mistakes that you can make while exercising:

Not doing a warm up
Doing your exercises in bad form
Not resting in between exercises
Not drinking enough water during exercise

If you work on correcting your mistakes, your exercise quality and results will be improved. To Improve Exercise Results You should always focus on quality of exercise before speed.

In order to achieve the best possible fat loss and strength and endurance gains, you should include a balance of cardio exercise and strength exercise in your 15-minute workout.

Weekly Workout Plan

When a person plans his/her workouts each week, he/she is not wasting time thinking of what he/she will do for workout each day.

To create a weekly plan that varies your workout types from one day to another allows your body to continue progressing but also keeps boredom from occurring by doing something new. A sample of these types of activities could be strength on some days, and cardio on other days, and by doing this your entire level of fitness can improve.

A sample weekly workout plan could look as follows, Monday full body, Tuesday cardio, Wednesday strength, Thursday cardio, Friday full body, and light stretch and/or walk on the weekend. This type of plan is simple to use and is easy for busy people to follow.

Workout Tracking

You do not need complicated workout tracker applications; a simple pen and paper notebook can work very well. An application such as Nike Training Club or Google Fit can also track your workouts.

Conclusion

Consistency is far more important than perfection when completing a workout. A short workout completed on a daily basis will yield far greater benefits than a long workout that you only do once a week.

These short daily workouts will increase your heart health; your strength; your energy level; and your mental health. Completing short daily workouts will also decrease your stress levels and increase your focus in both your home and work life.

Start with the basics, follow your weekly workout plan; and gradually improve. Your ultimate goal should be to incorporate exercise in to your daily life.

If you continue to be consistent, 15-minutes of physical activity can provide the means to improving your quality of life.