6 Benefits and Advantages of Circuit Training

Unless you get paid to go to the gym, your fitness routine will be eating into valuable time in your busy work and family activities.

What circuit training allows you to do is focus intense workouts into a short class of 30 to 45 minutes.

You no longer need multiple trips to the gym over a week to cover all muscle groups.

Instead, you have a mix of squats, jumping jacks, push-ups, lunges, lifting weights (kettlebells, dumbbells, etc.), and many more exercise variations in each session.

metabolism high enough to work on those unwanted fat reserves and calorie burn [1].

I’ve had clients who struggled with love handles despite a good exercise and fitness regime, and within a few months of regularly doing circuit training stations, they saw some drastic changes in their physique.

It’s the way your body reacts to a constant variance in an exercise that seems to be the recipe for working your muscles and achieving a positive result on the scales.

When you plan each circuit for a workout or join a class where the circuits are already set up, then you should end up in a situation where every muscle group in your body is targeted.

The challenge is to have the endurance to go from one part of the circuit to the next without holding up other participants.

That forces you to pick the right number of repetitions and go through every single body part at a different pace.

With very little rest, you’ll also make it a great cardio exercise program, improving full-body fitness and endurance [2].

Some people love it, others get bored quickly, but in general, you should find that circuit training exercises are a bit more fun than standard weight training.

You’ll still use a lot of regular gym equipment, but the random combination of squats, jump rope, planks, push-ups, cardio, and even powerlifting give the circuits a lot more spice.

The variety of these power exercises gains the best effectiveness.

I personally find that those clients that have a lot more fun during their workouts stick with it for the long-term.

A lot of people think that circuit training is just about getting your heart rate up by having a different cardio exercise at each station.

While you certainly can set up circuits to do that, it’s a lot more common to include some resistance training(trx) to work with free weights or resistance bands.

I’ve done some circuit workouts with high weight loads and very low reps to get some serious muscle definition going.

It’s not a one size fits all approach, and the more movements you include in the workout, the better the training benefit will be.

Every circuit routine will make use of any tool and equipment available on-site.

The great thing is that you can even set yourself up in any place, even in small areas like your living room, garage, or hotel room - almost anywhere.

A yoga mat and some exercise bands are all the equipment you need to get to work, with nothing more than your own effort standing in the way of getting to your goal.

And if you do head to the gym, then make the most of the space and equipment or let some trainer do the planning for a group session.