How is 10 Minutes a Week Possible?

by Quantify Fitness | Last Updated:  July 10, 2016

One reason lifting weights at the gym is so time-consuming and takes much longer than 10 minutes a week, is because you have to do multiple sets and repetitions to cause the healthy stress and muscle damage that provides the benefits of weight training. This also means you may have to go multiple times per week to effectively work all your muscles. And then you have to worry whether you could be overtraining – if you're always fatigued, your joints are always sore, or you're frequently falling ill, you may be training too much.

With traditional gravity-based weights or machines, you have to pick a weight that you're able to lift, and that's the weight you're stuck with for the entire set, but did you know you have different levels of strength within the range-of-motion for an exercise? And did you know you can lower a lot more weight than you can lift? For example, if someone handed you a 500lb box, you might be able to set it down but good luck picking it back up. So That means when you're lifting weights at the gym you're leaving a lot of “meat-on-the-bone” versus what you're capable of.

At Quantify Fitness we use adaptive resistance with ARX. Just think of ARX as a magic barbell, where the weight is adapted to you and provides the perfect amount of resistance that you can handle at each point within the range-of-motion. Putting full tension on your muscles both positively (the concentric phase where the muscle is shortening during contraction) and negatively (the eccentric phase where the muscle is lengthening during contraction). This form of adaptive tension is impossible with gravity-based weights.

Bigger muscles = larger glycogen (sugar) stores in your muscles = more efficient insulin and blood sugar control

Since we're able to use ARX to provide perfect resistance and maximally load the muscles, it will take more time for your body to repair and grow back bigger and stronger. When your muscles are damaged during an ARX strength training workout, this damage occurs at a cellular level and requires a fairly extensive recovery process (it can take longer for your central nervous system to adapt and recover so just because you're not sore doesn't mean you're fully recovered). For most people, it takes between 4-8 days for full recovery, which is why we recommend once a week visits to get the benefits of what would typically take hours in a regular gym or with a personal trainer every week.

If someone really wants to come twice a week because they recover fast or looking to isolate specific muscles, we can customize the second workout to prevent overtraining and impeding recovery.

THE ACTUAL WORKOUT ITSELF IS CLOSER TO 6 MINUTES PER WEEK!

With gravity-based weights, you also have to choose whether your goal is strength (high-weight 1-3 reps), hypertrophy aka bigger muscles (mid-weight 4-12 reps) or metabolic conditioning and endurance (low-weight 13+ reps).

Gravity based weights are like a gas stove; it may be possible to heat your house with the stove, but it's not very efficient. We prefer the furnace, which in this case is ARX. Because ARX uses adaptive resistance and recruits your fast-twitch muscle fibers first, you can achieve maximal results in strength, hypertrophy, and metabolic conditioning at the same time.

And we track your workouts so you know you're getting results!

What about Cardio?

Dr. Doug McGruff references some of the science on this topic in his book, Body by Science:

“It is a false assumption that the oxygen using part of metabolism is somehow uniquely hooked up to the cardiovascular system. Everyone thinks that aerobic equals cardiovascular to the extent they have become interchangeable in peoples' lexicon.

The low resting heart rate and others markers for good health are not really something that's happened in the cardiovascular system, but because the energy producing part of the body like the mitochondria, and all the enzymes involved in the production of energy, are upregulated and become more powerful and efficient. Thereby making the cardiovascular system have to work less hard, and that's born out through the parameters that we measure like heart rate and blood pressure.”

Fat Loss

Additionally, when you build muscle, it is far more metabolically active compared to fat, which means your basal metabolic rate increases and you burn more calories at rest every day to allow your body to maintain the muscle.

Your body also has to utilize more energy (calories) in the days following an ARX workout session to repair the microtrauma in your muscles. With typical cardio like jogging this post-calorie burn period is minimal, maybe a few additional hours.

10 Minutes a Week is No Gimmick!

If all of this is confusing, the point is we use the most effective tools available to make it possible to get an effective workout in 10 minutes a week. The Quantify Fitness smartgym was created to resolve some of the biggest obstacles to health and fitness: time and complexity.

It doesn't matter what your background is, as long as the doctor says you're okay to exercise, we have a workout for you. Our clients range from high-school students to senior citizens, people who haven't exercised in years to professional athletes and gym rats. Give it a shot and you may shocked to see it doesn't really take all that time to stay fit.

Before you get too excited, this doesn't mean you should lay on the couch and eat potato chips the rest of the week. Proper diet and daily movement are an integral part of a healthy lifestyle, but that's too much for one post so more on that later. Or we can discuss it when you stop by to try out ARX!

See you soon!

Watch former NFL Tennessee Titan and Pro-Bowl receiver Derrick Mason's reaction to his 6-minute workout

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