What Gets Cut When Lifters Are Short on Time? (And What Should Get Cut)

You have 25 minutes, a 60-minute training plan, and a decision to make. Do you drop the squats or the curls? Skip the warm-up? Rush your rest timer? Most lifters short on time make these cuts on instinct, at the gym door, with no idea whether they’re trimming fat or muscle from their routine. So we went looking for the answer in the data: I analyzed the workout logs of Fitbod’s most consistent lifters to see exactly what they sacrifice when they have to cut a session in half and then checked their choices against the exercise science. It turns out they get most of it right.

Key Takeaways

• When Fitbod lifters cut a workout by 50% or more, they drop entire exercises (down 40.5% on average) rather than trimming sets – sets per exercise fall by just 0.15.
• Short workouts become focused workouts: full-coverage sessions (push, pull, legs, core) drop from 19% to 9% of workouts, while upper-only, legs-only, and core-only sessions all rise.
• Time-crunched lifters are 27x more likely to log a bodyweight-only workout, suggesting many skip the gym and train at home.
• Isolation movements get cut more than compounds (47% vs. 36%) and that’s exactly what the exercise science supports.
• Rest times don’t change in short workouts, and for hypertrophy that’s mostly fine; for strength, keep rests around 2 minutes or more.
• Lifters cut supersets when they should be adding them research shows supersets save roughly a third of workout time with minimal downside for muscle growth.
• Warm-up routines, warm-up sets, and cardio all get cut in short workouts, and for most lifters that’s an acceptable trade.
• Contrary to the “skip leg day” stereotype, legs are slightly protected in short workouts: quads (32%) and glutes (33%) get cut far less than triceps (51%) or biceps (48%).

Why Short Workouts Matter

We all have extra-busy days when we’re tempted to shorten or skip the workout. If you’ve managed to show up and still get a workout in with limited time, congratulations. That’s a strong step in the right direction when it comes to building consistency in your workouts and strength training routine.

But did you cut the right things?

How We Analyzed Fitbod’s Workout Data

I mined Fitbod’s data to find lifters who are pretty consistent with their routine: they train regularly and their workout duration doesn’t vary much. Then I looked into what they do when they need to cut their workouts by 50% or more.

Fitbod User Data at a Glance

What Gets Cut When Workouts Get Shorter

Exercises Get Cut, Not Sets

The number of sets Fitbod lifters log per exercise barely changes; a tiny drop of 0.15 sets per exercise on average but exercise count drops by 40.5% on average. Instead of cutting exercises you could, theoretically, keep the same number of exercises and do only one set of each.

Whatever exercises you’re doing, you want them to count. Doing a single set of Dumbbell Curls might not achieve much – that said, single-set workouts can work, but terms and conditions apply. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Androulakis-Korakakis and colleagues found that even a single hard set of 6–12 reps at 70–85% of your 1-rep max, done 2–3 times per week, produces significant, though not optimal, strength gains in trained lifters so the “minimum effective dose” is lower than most people think, but each set has to be taken close to failure to count.

There’s also some friction in switching exercises: you need to change equipment, walk to another part of the gym, maybe wait for your turn to use the machine. Keeping the same number of exercises but doing only 1–2 sets of each might leave you with a not-so-short workout in the end. Dropping entire exercises altogether is the time-optimizing move.

Full-Body Workouts Give Way to Focused Workouts

People don’t just cut exercises they cut entire muscle groups. As a result, the frequency of “narrow” workouts rises: upper-only workouts go from 15% of all workouts to 23%, legs-only goes from 5% to 14%, and core-only goes from 0.2% to 10%. The share of workouts covering all four splits (push, pull, legs, core) drops from 19% to 9%.

When you’re short on time, don’t disperse – concentrate. A 20-minute workout can still give your quads and hams meaningful work, but it can’t give your quads, hams, biceps, triceps, chest, abs, and trapezius meaningful work.

Equipment Gets Dropped for Bodyweight Training

People who are short on time are 27 times more likely to log a bodyweight-only workout, which suggests that in many cases people are skipping the gym entirely and working out at home when they’re in a rush. It makes sense: you save the commute and you don’t need to wait for your turn at the leg press machine.

Fitbod data suggests that people who work out with equipment tend to get slightly larger gains than people who work out without equipment, but we can’t read too much into that: equipment could be proxying for commitment such as willingness to pay for a gym membership or for a set of dumbbells, and any exercise is better than no exercise. Also, we have tons of examples of bodyweight-only lifters who are incredibly jacked.

Isolation Movements Get Cut More Than Compound Movements

Both compound and isolation movements get cut, but isolation movements get cut proportionally more: by 36% and 47%, respectively. Also, compound-only workouts go from being 6% of all workouts to being 28%.

That’s good. When you’re short on time, you should absolutely prioritize compound movements over isolation ones. That’s one big way to optimize your training. In a randomized trial by Paoli and colleagues comparing volume-matched multi-joint and single-joint training, both groups gained muscle and lost fat, but the multi-joint group saw significantly larger improvements in strength and cardiorespiratory fitness and Iversen and colleagues’ review of time-efficient training explicitly recommends prioritizing bilateral, multi-joint exercises when time is limited. The Back Squat hits several joints (hips, knees, ankles) and several muscle groups (quads, glutes, and adductors), and it also engages your core and back for stability. That’s the sort of exercise you’re looking for when you’re in a hurry.

Supersets Get Cut – But They Shouldn’t

Supersets appear in 44% of regular workouts but in only 37% of shortened workouts. It should be the other way around.

Research shows that supersets save you a ton of time with negligible downside in terms of gains: a randomized controlled trial of whole-body superset training found supersets deliver very similar muscle growth to traditional sets in roughly a third less time, and Iversen and colleagues estimate that techniques like supersets can roughly halve training time while maintaining training volume.

Unless you’re a professional athlete training for an upcoming competition in which case every single muscle fiber counts you should absolutely be super-setting your exercises when you’re in a hurry, and probably even when you’re not.

Warm-Up Routines Get Cut

In our sample, about 10% of the “normal” workouts had a dedicated warm-up section, whereas only 6% of the short workouts did.

The scientific evidence suggests that cutting warm-up routines is okay for the vast majority of people. Warm-ups have basically zero effect on strength, hypertrophy, flexibility, or recovery.

That said, in some circumstances a warm-up routine may be helpful. For instance, it seems to help a bit if your goal is power or speed. And it may be protective in some cases for instance, if you have high cardiovascular risk. Check this paper for more information.

The most important predictor of strength gains and hypertrophy gains is consistency, so if a warm-up routine is something you enjoy doing and it motivates you to work out, by all means keep doing it. The Fitbod app offers tons of warm-up and cooldown options.

Warm-Up Sets Get Cut

Warm-up sets (lighter sets at the beginning of each exercise) show up in 47% of regular workouts and only in 28% of short workouts.

Some studies report a small improvement in 1-Rep-Max performance if you do warm-up sets, but it seems to be a short-term effect that doesn’t translate into long-term gains. Other studies, like this one, report no benefit whatsoever. And there’s little to no evidence of any impact on hypertrophy, injury prevention, or recovery. So it’s not a big deal to skip your warm-up sets.

Cardio Gets Cut

Cardio appears in 33% of regular workouts but in only 20% of short workouts. Your VO2 max won’t drop 10% because you missed one cardio session.

It’s totally fine if you do only cardio when you’re short on time. Your Bench Press 1-Rep-Max won’t drop 10% because you skipped one push day.

Prioritize what matters most to you.

What Doesn’t Get Cut: Rest Times

This was unexpected. I pictured lifters rushing through the exercises, shortening rest times to 10 or 5 seconds. But no – there’s no change here. If anything, rest times even go up a little bit in short workouts, though the difference 4.3 seconds isn’t statistically significant.

The latest evidence suggests that, specifically for hypertrophy, rest times above a minimum threshold are usually not that critical a Bayesian meta-analysis on inter-set rest and muscle hypertrophy found that once rest exceeds a modest floor, longer rests add little for muscle growth. So if you’re in a hurry, your goal is to bulk up, and you’re waiting 5 minutes between sets, it’s probably not that big of a deal if you shorten it to 90 seconds. As long as you can do it safely, always monitor your fatigue.

For strength, rest times seem to play a bigger role: Schoenfeld and colleagues found that 3-minute rests produced greater strength gains than 1-minute rests in trained men. But there’s a difficult trade-off: assuming a fixed workout duration and all else equal, longer rest times mean lower volume fewer reps and fewer pounds. Scientists haven’t yet found the exact sweet spot. For now, you probably don’t want to go too far below 2 minutes.

For strength it’s less about volume and a more about the intensity in how heavy you’re lifting.

How Lifters Use (and Don’t Use) Fitbod’s Duration Settings

The Fitbod app lets you choose your workout duration you tell us 15 minutes or 60 minutes or whatever, and we’ll give you a workout we think will take you approximately that long to do. So if you’re short on time, you can tap the 15-minute option, and let us create a short workout for you.

But what people do instead, when they’re short on time, is request a normal-duration workout and then manually remove the exercises they don’t have time to do.

That was another surprising pattern. If you’re in a hurry, then presumably you have less time to think, so I expected hurried lifters to rely on the Fitbod algorithm more, not less. The fact that the opposite happens suggests the constraints are perhaps too specific; maybe your environment is different like home, hotel gym, a friend’s garage gym and it’s easier to drop exercises than to change your equipment list. I’ll dig more on that.

Do Men Use Short Workouts to Skip Leg Day Even More?

Weightlifters tend to skew male, and that’s reflected in Fitbod’s gender distribution. We know from previous analyses, like this one, that men tend to prefer upper body exercises, so I expected leg exercises to get cut more when our users are short on time.

I was wrong. If anything, legs are slightly protected in short workouts: they get cut less than upper body muscle groups.

Lifters cut 40.5% of all exercises on average on short days, but when we look at it by muscle group, here’s what we find.

Lifters cut:

• Triceps: 51%
• Biceps: 48%
• Shoulders: 47%
• Back: 47%

more than they cut:

• Hams: 43%
• Calves: 43%
• Glutes: 33%
• Quads: 32%

To be clear, this is not at all what I expected to find.

Ruling Out a Sample Skew

I thought that maybe I had ended up with a sample that skewed female for some reason. Who knows maybe by selecting consistent users I somehow skewed the gender ratio. But no.

I checked: similar male/female ratio as in our general user base. Or maybe the same male/female ratio as usual, but with a lot more workouts logged by women.

Nope. Similar male/female ratio when it comes to workout counts as well, women do log more workouts in this particular sample, but not nearly enough to explain the pattern.

What’s Happening, Then?

To answer that, we first need to look at the baselines: men’s regular-duration workouts are already short on legs. On normal days, legs represent 24% of men’s focused workouts (i.e., leg-only, upper-only, etc.) and 34% of women’s. On short days, the figures converge: 30% for men and 30% for women.

As a result, shortened workouts erase the gender gap. We can’t know that for sure – we can see what users do, not why. So this is all a bit speculative.

Do Experienced Lifters Cut Differently?

Yes, they cut more. Folks with under one year of Fitbod history cut sets by 38% on average; folks with one or more years cut sets by 43%, these are total sets, not sets per exercise. Also, more experienced lifters tend to shift more toward bodyweight work.

But, and this is the big difference, more experienced lifters switch more heavily to compound exercises when they’re short on time. People with under one year of Fitbod history increase their compound set share by a mere 3 percentage points. For people with 2+ years of Fitbod history, it’s 6 percentage points.

Where to Learn More

There’s a great research paper by Prof. Vegard Iversen and others “No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy” with lots of practical takeaways for the time-pressed lifter. Worth reading in full.

Final Thoughts: How to Cut a Workout the Right Way

The encouraging news from Fitbod’s data is that time-crunched lifters mostly cut the right things by instinct. Dropping whole exercises instead of trimming sets, narrowing the workout to fewer muscle groups, shifting toward compound movements, and skipping warm-ups and cardio are all defensible moves and the research on minimum effective training doses shows that a genuinely short session, done with real effort, still produces meaningful adaptations. A 50%-shorter workout is nowhere near 50% less effective, because the first sets of an exercise deliver most of the stimulus and compound lifts let one movement train several muscle groups at once.

The one clear miss is supersets. Lifters cut them exactly when they’re most valuable, even though controlled trials show pairing exercises ideally ones that hit non-overlapping muscle groups, like a squat with a row delivers essentially the same hypertrophy in roughly a third less time. If you change one thing about your short-on-time workouts after reading this, make it that: instead of deleting another exercise, pair two of the ones you kept.

The second lesson is to match your cuts to your goal. If you’re training primarily for muscle growth, you can compress rest periods toward 90 seconds and lean on supersets, because the hypertrophy evidence says rest duration matters less than total hard sets. If you’re chasing maximal strength, protect your rest instead longer inter-set rests measurably improve strength gains and cut exercises more aggressively so the two or three heavy compound lifts you keep still get 2+ minutes between sets.

Finally, keep the big picture in view: the most important variable in any training program is that it keeps happening. A 20-minute bodyweight session at home on a chaotic day preserves the habit, the momentum, and most of the physiological signal. The lifters in our data who show up and cut smart are already ahead of everyone who waited for a free hour that never came. If you’d rather not think through any of this at the gym door, set a shorter duration in Fitbod and let the algorithm make these trade-offs more compounds, fewer isolation movements, the same working sets for you.