Welcome to Mayo Clinic's podcast. This month's topic is weight training. I'm your host, Rich Dietman.

Weight training is a great way to keep fit and an excellent complement to aerobic exercise. Regular weight training can help you reduce body fat, increase lean muscle mass and burn more calories. Now you might be thinking, "I don't have time for weight training." The good news is, you don't have to spend hours pumping iron to get the benefits of weight training. A 20-minute session, two to three times a week, is all most people need. In today's podcast, we're talking with Dr. Ed Laskowski, a fitness specialist at Mayo Clinic, about five ways you can shave time off your weight training workout, while still getting results similar to those of a longer workout. Dr. Laskowski, thanks for being with us today.

Dr. Laskowski: Thank you, Rich, and thanks for outlining those benefits of weight training. It truly is a wonderful exercise that can help us accomplish many more things in life and also help us with things we don't even think about, like weight loss. If we increase lean muscle mass, we aid weight loss. But, a lot of people say, well, "I don't have time to do it" or "I'm not a professional bodybuilder, professional weight lifter." We're going to give you a few tips on things that will really make your workouts easier, more palatable and hopefully more enjoyable, too.

I think the single most important thing that I tell people about weight training is that you really don't have to spend a lot of time in the gym to get the benefits that you want. And, there's been multiple studies out there that show that actually, one single set of exercises can be as effective as multiple sets of exercise. The tradition that you'll hear a lot in the gym is, you have to do three sets of exercise, sometimes even four, five or six, to get the benefit, and that really isn't true. Many studies have shown, in fact, one large what we call meta-analysis, which looks at a lot of different studies, showed that of 35 studies, 33 out of 35 showed no difference between single- and multi-set training, and that applies to the amount of lean muscle mass that you gain, the type of strength gain achieved, and even the appearance, the tone of the muscle, in the increase of lean muscle mass. So that's huge right there. So instead of spending maybe an hour, an hour and 20 minutes on your workout, you really can spend only 20 minutes on the workout.

Rich Dietman: And, just doing one set, or perhaps two sets?

Dr. Laskowski: One set. Actually the physiological principal is, once you fatigue a muscle, you fatigue a muscle. And when you fatigue that muscle, it stimulates something in that muscle to adapt and help it to get stronger and bear more resistance. So, really the research has shown that about one set of 12 to 15 repetitions, so now you don't even have to remember the number or the poundage of weight you're lifting. If you can lift a weight that fatigues your muscle, say at the 12th to the 15th repetition, somewhere around there, so the 12th or 13th repetition is very hard, just barely able to get it up, that's an ideal stimulus to promote strength, and that's really all that you need to do. Whether you do that two or three more times, the benefit is much decreasing. Now having said this, there are very defined goals for bodybuilders where multiple sets may be beneficial, but really for 85 to 90 percent of the population, a single set is all you need.

Rich Dietman: What's your next tip for people who want to save time but also want to get the benefit of weight training?

Dr. Laskowski: Well, one thing you could try would be splitting your workout into different sessions, so say you do upper body workout on Monday, lower body on Tuesday. That way, you won't have a bolus of time in the weight room — you won't have to spend that much time in one single session. And by dividing it up, you'll probably spend less time, but you'll still efficiently work all that you need to work. So if you're one of those people that can get to the gym, it's nearby where you live, and you like shorter bouts of exercise, that's a good thing to do. You don't have to work all the muscle groups at the same time.

Rich Dietman: So, arms, shoulders, back muscles during one session, and lower body — quads, calves, things like that — at the next session?

Dr. Laskowski: Exactly.

Rich Dietman: OK, so, another tip — this is tip No. 3 now.

Dr. Laskowski: We like isolated exercise. Isolated exercise isolates one muscle group. But we also like integrated exercise, and you may hear in the weight room a term called compound exercise — and it's working a lot of different muscles at the same time. Each of those are good, so maybe you could pick one day and do more isolated exercise, say a knee extension exercise for the quadriceps muscle, and the next day you could do more of an integrated exercise, like a squat exercise or a leg press. Now that includes the quadriceps muscle, but it also includes other muscle groups in the lower extremities in an integrated fashion. And that's a very good thing to do because that's the way we use the muscle, during life or duing sport activities.

Rich Dietman: Would you combine, in a compound exercise, would you combine upper and lower body at the same time?

Dr. Laskowski: You could. We're not too fond of things like people running with weights on because that can create some momentum effects which can actually cause a little bit of harmful effect to the muscle tissue. So we think you should really — if you're going to strength train, strength train; if you're going to do aerobic exercise, do aerobic exercise. Upper and lower body exercise, the only problem is, it can be done, but again, the technique must be impeccable. So if you're going to try to do an upper body move with the lower body move that you're doing, or exercise that you're doing, you just need to make sure that the technique is as good as can be for that whole set of exercises. I think more of the compound exercise is more of a leg press. You don't necessarily have to integrate upper and lower body, but you can integrate multiple muscles in a limb, rather than just using one muscle in the limb.

Rich Dietman: OK, and your next tip?

Dr. Laskowski: Well, if you don't have much time, focus on the muscle groups that you need to work on most, and this may be according to your goal. Is your goal just fitness? General fitness? Increasing lean muscle mass? Is it appearance? Are you trying to get a specific area to look better than it does or you have a certain goal in that area? Or is it a sports-specific goal? If you're a tennis player, you'll want to emphasize different muscle groups than you are if you play football, or maybe soccer, or if you're a golfer. So tailoring the workout to what you need most and what your goals are, I think would be very time-efficient as opposed to just doing a general workout of every muscle of upper and lower body throughout every week.

Rich Dietman: When you say major muscle groups, it's easy enough to figure that big muscle sets — like quadriceps, and for some people biceps — are major muscle groups, but what are some of the others that people ought to think about when they think about exercising major muscle groups?

Dr. Laskowski: Well, that trains us into our last point about opposing muscle groups, and I guess a way to think about opposing muscle groups is balance. We really want to stress balance in your workout. So, if you think of the lower body, the quadriceps are balanced by the hamstring muscles, and if you think of your back and spine, the abdominal muscles are balanced by the low back muscles. If you think of the upper body, the chest and shoulder muscles are balanced by the upper back muscles and the back of the shoulder muscles, and we always want to strive for that. Many people will tend to work what they see. And again, if you're looking for an efficient workout, you may just work those ones that you see. And in the shoulder we have a saying that everyone has Cadillacs in the front, Volkswagens in the back, because they work the biceps, chest muscles, all muscles in the front, but they neglect those back muscles. So again, maybe you want to do chest and front of the shoulder on one day. Maybe the next day you want to work on some of those muscles that oppose them, so the muscles around the shoulder blade, the muscles in the back of the shoulder. Same thing for the legs. So the quadriceps is a muscle in the front of your thigh that's very powerful. Maybe you do want to work it that one day, but the next day maybe you want to work the hamstrings, or the opposing muscle in the back of the leg. And that will help protect you, again with respect to the ACL, and will also create a balance in the muscle definition and muscle function.

Rich Dietman: Well, those are five great tips for both getting the most out of the weight training workout but also shaving some time off of it and being as efficient as possible.

Thanks very much, Dr. Laskowski. We've been talking with Dr. Ed Laskowski, a fitness specialist at Mayo Clinic. You've been listening to a Mayo Clinic podcast. I'm Rich Dietman.