20 Minute Workouts for a Healthier You

The key to jumpstarting your 20-minute workout and ending up with something that provides you quantifiable results is variation. Never underestimate your body's ability to adapt to routines. Your brain has been hardwired to become receptive to habit formation. In terms of exercise, that's a bad thing simply because if your body is used to a pattern, you'll get less muscle-building benefits from your repetitive regimen.

If you become too used to a given exercise, you'll end up burning fewer calories or gaining less muscle mass because your body has "efficiently" adapted to it, letting you do the same exercise with less metabolic impact and energy used. Ergo, when doing the following exercises, don't forget to switch them up so that you won't fall into any patterns and your body is constantly undergoing new routines before it gets too used to old ones.

At any rate, the true challenge of a 20-minute exercise routine is the motivation to do it. In order to end up looking halfway decent with your shirt off, you need to do a lot of work. Besides which, your washboard abs won't appear until you've won against the battle of the bulge and lost enough weight to make your abdominals visible.

To be more specific, you need to have a fat percentage within the single digits in order to get those model-like midsections you see on television. That takes a lot of work and discipline, so celebrities have personal trainers that push them to get in shape. Meanwhile, you only have yourself and your own determination to help you make a change for the better. All the same, you don't need to go to the gym all day to exercise.

As long as you do a superset of exercises within a short period of time... about twenty to thirty minutes a day... you're good to go. Each cycle of the superset takes two minutes, and by repeating this daily, you would've done enough reps to make yourself look buff, cut, and ripped. Take note of what each superset contains and do them.

The pushup and crunch superset includes ten left to right crunches, ten tricep pushups, ten crunches, ten wide pushups, ten crunches, and ten regular pushups. Meanwhile, the leg and ab superset requires you to repeat five cycles of twenty crunches, twenty calf raises, ten crunches, ten lunges per leg, twenty crunches, and twenty squats. As for running and walking, check out how much you can do within a thirty minute period.

Some can walk two to three miles and others can run double that amount of miles. When running, you can have this menu of things to do. You can jog a quarter of a mile, do three sets of quarter-mile sprints within a period of fifty to a hundred seconds, and jog a mile within seven to eight minutes. You can also do six sets of a sprint covering an eighth of a mile or jog with the same amount of miles.

The rule of thumb here is you can do lengthy walks or sprints with fewer repetitions or do shorter-distance walks or sprints with a greater number of reps. Don't forget to alternate between indoor and outdoor exercises to keep your body from getting used to either regimen.