As much as we'd like to spend all day in the gym, that's not always realistic.

Sometimes you get injured, or life gets in the way and you need to adjust your exercises to reduce the workload or shorten the sessions. Or you might realise that you're hitting a plateau or not seeing the results you'd like, and you need to increase the amount of work you're doing.

Whichever situation you're in, we've put together a list of ways you can scale up or scale down your workouts to suit your needs.

Adjust Your Rest Times

Most of the time you spend in the gym isn't actually spent working out, it's spent resting in between sets. You can save a lot of time by supersetting certain exercises to cut down on the rest times.

Supersetting works by taking two exercises that work different muscle groups and doing them back to back, resting, then starting again. For example you would do -

• 1 set of dumbbell curls

• 1 set of ring push ups on a Half Squat Rack

• 2-5 minutes of rest

• Repeat for 3-4 total sets

This can take half an hour off your workouts without impacting performance, and as long as you make sure you're working different muscle groups and don’t overexert your cardiovascular system you can add as many exercises to the superset as you want.

Adjust Your Exercise Selection

By swapping certain exercises out for variations that hit multiple muscle groups at once you can cut down on the total number of exercises in the routine while still ensuring you hit all the areas you want to. For example, you could swap -

• Bench press + overhead press for an incline bench press

• Sit ups + reverse curls for weighted hanging leg raises

Adjust The Weights

If you find yourself getting injured or plateauing then you should take a look at the weight you're using. If it's too heavy then you could hurt yourself by using bad form to swing the weight around, placing unnecessary stress on joints and tendons that can lead to injury, making it harder to train effectively. It's a vicious circle.

If the weight is too light then you might find that you're not making as much progress as you'd hoped since you're not pushing the muscles hard enough to force them to get stronger.

The best option for each situation is to choose a weight that's manageable yet difficult, then slowly add weight over time by using fractional plates. This will keep you gaining strength without having to jump straight to adding extra 5kg Weight Plates on the bar.

Adjust The Reps and Sets

If you've reached a strength training plateau you should also take a look at the sets and reps that you're doing.

If you're only doing 2 sets per exercise then try increasing it to 3 or 4 and see if it makes a difference. It may not sound like a lot, but just going from 2-3 sets on an exercise is a 50% increase in the total work you do. That could add up to the equivalent of doing a whole extra session or two a week. This can be especially useful if you are new to training at home. Increasing your sets means you can still get a good workout using a pair of 2kg dumbbells.

You might have the opposite problem where you're doing too many sets, if you're currently doing more than 5 sets per exercise then try cutting down to 3 or 4, you might be over training your body so it can't adequately recover between workouts.

Adjust Your RPE

RPE, or Rate of Perceived Exhaustion, is a way to measure how intense a set is. It works on a scale of 1-10, with an RPE 1 meaning it was extremely easy and RPE 10 meaning you reached complete muscular failure and could not complete another rep no matter how hard you tried.

If you're not seeing the size or strength gains that you'd like then there's a good chance you're not pushing your sets hard enough, so determining what RPE you've been performing at will help you find out where you can improve.

If you're aiming to maximise strength gains then staying a few reps away from failure has been shown to most efficiently create strength adaptation, so you'd want to stay around an RPE of 7-8.

Muscle growth on the other hand is best achieved by pushing the muscle to near or complete failure, so to maximise size gains you should take as many sets as possible to RPE 9 or 10.

Keep in mind that failure can only be safely achieved with the right equipment in place, if you're bench or overhead pressing then make sure you have safety spotters in place, and a safety squat bar will make the weight feel more stable during squats.

Now you have ideas for how to scale up or down a workout depending on your needs and goals. If you're a PT looking to scale workouts for your clients, check out our Commercial Gym Equipment UK range of products.

Try these tips out and you'll find that you just might be able to see more results in even less time.

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