As you already know, there is no magic bullet for improving your conditioning or body.
No matter what path you take, it will require some time commitment on your part.
However, spending more time in the gym does not always equal better results.
In fact, shorter, high quality workouts are probably the best path to take if you goal is to lose weight and improve body composition with as little of a time investment as possible.
Believe it or not, most people waste an incredible amount of time during the course of their workouts.
Are you one of them? My average workout is usually around 45 minutes, with the occasional 60 minute workout in there somewhere.
In less than one hour I warm-up, workout, cool down and get out of the gym.
I keep my workouts short, and you can too, by following a few basic time efficient training principles.
Principle 1: Stay Focused On Your Workout Conversation is probably one of the biggest time drains on your workout.
You can still talk to people while you are working out, but if time efficiency is your goal make sure you talk during your rest periods and stick to your rest periods.
Try not to let a conversation drag a 2 minute break into a 10 minute break.
You don't want to spend 90 minutes in a gym and only workout for 30 minutes.
Principle 2: Constantly Change Your Routine Your body adapts to what you give it very quickly.
Do the same old routine day in and day out and your results will suffer.
You are still moving, so it is good for your heart, but you will notice very little, if any, progress if you don't change things up.
As little as 2 weeks is enough to get you into a rut.
You need to change things up (intensity, volume, exercises, etc) regularly.
My training program is more power based, but I will focus more on endurance for 3-4 weeks at a time just to keep my body guessing.
By changing things up you can actually get better results in less time because you are constantly exposing your body to new training stimuli before it has the chance you get into a rut.
Change things up by using different cardio strategies, weight lifting set/rep/tempo schemes, etc Principle 3: Train To Failure As mentioned before, you need intensity in order to improve your strength/conditioning levels and body composition.
Using the same resistance every workout and stopping at ten reps when you actually could do 20 will not give you the improvements you are looking for.
While you do not have to try for maximal effort every set, it is important to challenge yourself a little bit every workout.
If you are performing 10 reps, pick a resistance level so that you fail (cannot lift anymore for that set) around 12 reps.
On the second set pick a weight where you will fail on the 11th rep.
On the third set, you want that 10th rep to be the absolute last one you can do.
By doing this you will rapidly improve your strength and overall conditioning and will help guarantee constant progress.
I should also mention that most people should not worry about "bulking up" due to lifting with intensity.
Without getting into details, it is actually very hard to put on significant amounts of muscles mass.
For women it is even harder because they lack the hormone levels/combinations needed for putting on serious muscle.
Principle 4: Keep Your Heart Pumping I very strongly believe that you can get an workout session in while also challenging your cardiovascular system.
The secret is in how you structure your workout and the type of exercises you do.
By training in a more intense fashion and keeping your rest intervals to a minimum you keep your heart pumping and burn far more calories than resistance or cardio training alone.
This will significantly decrease the amount of cardio training you will have to do and will reduce the time needed to lose weight.
Hopefully these basic time efficient training principles will help you workout better, smarter and get more impressive results in less time.
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