Imagine getting a crazy good workout in 30 minutes or less, while both strengthening your muscles and challenging your cardiovascular system. A workout that can easily be tailored to fit your fitness goals. A style of training that boosts your calorie burn, and helps you get results faster. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Enter: Circuit Training.
What is Circuit Training?
Circuit training is extremely common in boot camp style classes. You’ve likely even done a circuit training workout before and not even realized it. The variation that’s common in these workouts, make your workout more entertaining all while challenging a variety of muscles and burning tons of calories. Fun and effective - it doesn’t get better than that!
During a circuit workout you cycle through a series of exercises targeting different muscle groups, with minimal rest in between. By pushing your body to workout with little to no rest between exercises, you’ll put your muscular endurance to the test while achieving a cardiovascular burn. By changing up the exercises within a circuit, it allows you to rest targeted muscle groups while continuing to work out others so you can keep your heart rate up, as your muscles get the rest they need between rounds.
What Are the Benefits of Circuit Training?
The benefits of circuit training are massive, and I’ve already touched on them quite a bit. But to sum up some of the big ones:
1. Entertaining
Because you’re constantly moving from exercise to exercise, you don’t really have time to get bored when doing a circuit style workout. These workouts are fun, engaging, and challenging! I know for some a challenge can be scary but challenge definitely has its place in your workout routine. Because if you aren’t challenging yourself somewhat in your workout routine, you’re not going to see a change.
2. Relatively Short Time Investment
Circuit workouts are typically pretty short. They can be upwards of 30 to 45 minutes, but don’t have to be. You can accomplish an effective circuit training workout in as little as 15-20 minutes; and, burn a comparable number of calories to any other heavy hitter workout out there. Any workout that can get you in and out of the gym that quickly is a win in my book!
3. Big Bang for Your Buck
Finally, circuit training is a major bang for your buck workout. Basically, what I mean by that is the time and effort you put in with these workouts is going to reap quality results. These workouts are extremely effective and maximize the time you put into them. They burn tons of calories, they’ll help you build strong, lean muscle, and will challenge your cardiovascular system. These workouts will whip you into shape!
How to Build Your Own Circuit-Style Workout
Circuit workouts are super easy to create yourself. All you have to do is select a handful of your favorite exercises and complete them one after another with minimal rest in between. You could do all bodyweight exercises, weighted exercises, a combination of the two, or alternate exercises with rounds of cardio.
I always recommend building your workout with two things in mind. First and foremost - base your workout on your fitness goals. If building strength is important to you adding weighted exercises into your circuit routine will help you make the progress you’re looking for. If you want to lose some weight, add some extra bursts of cardio between exercises to really keep that heart rate up your entire workout.
Second, you want to build a workout that you truly enjoy. Your enjoyment is a very important factor in your workout routine because it’s what keeps you coming back for more. What’s more important than burning tons of calories in one session, is building a routine that’s consistent, because that’s when we see real results.
Example Circuit Workouts
Still not sure what a circuit workout looks like? Here’s a few examples:
Full Body Bodyweight Circuit
Complete the circuit as quickly as you can, with little to no rest between exercises:
- 10 Pushups
- 15 Air Squats
- 5 Burpees
- 20 Mountain Climbers
- 12 Forward Lunges
Rest 60 seconds and repeat 4 times.
Lower Body Cardio Circuit
Complete the circuit as quickly as you can with little to no rest between exercises:
- 12 Back Lunges
- 30 second Cardio (Row, Run, Cycle, etc.)
- 10 Jump Squats
- 30 second Cardio
- 12 Step Ups
- 30 second Cardio
- 15 Air Squats
- 30 Second Cardio
- 12 Curtsy Lunges
- 30 Second Cardio
Rest 60 seconds and repeat 3-4 times.
Free Circuit Workouts
Don’t feel like coming up with your own workout? No sweat! We’ve got tons of free circuit workouts on the SHF YouTube Channel. I’ve linked a few of my favorites below.
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