How long are your workout sessions? How long should they be?

Famof72015 wrote: »

I don't want to start a debate how long they should be... didn't mean it like that. I just was not sure if exercising say 20 minutes would still be effective but I suppose the intensity you are exercising using in 20 minutes could be the same versus a 45 min workout.

I think you have to determine what effective means to you. A good 20 minute sprint/tempo interval session is very effective in improving my anaerobic capacity as well as improving my ability to attack and then come back to tempo and not dip below tempo even though I'm thrashed.

If my effective you mean calories burned...really, intensity plays a roll there, but it really comes down to mass moved over distance...so the longer I'm on the bike, the more calories I'm going to expend. In that regard though, I tend to look at my fitness for the sake of fitness...I control my weight with my diet. The exercise in and of itself isn't defaulting to weight loss, the calorie deficit is...

In a gym mostly an hour for regular weights or cardio as that fits in my day but longer cardio sessions aren't unusual in bad weather when I can't, or don't want to, get outside to cycle.
Outdoor cycling 1 hour would be unusually short, 6 to 9 hours would be unusually long.
Guessing 2 - 3hrs rides are my normal duration?

If I only had 25 mins to exercise I'm not sure I would bother to be honest, but of course it's better than nothing if that's all the time you have. But I'm not you and no doubt my goals are different to yours.

My daily "workouts" look something like this ...

1 km walk in the morning
25 flights of stairs done mostly in 2 sets during the day
1-5 km walk at lunch ... just depends what errands I need to run and how much energy I have
Short uphill walk home from the bus
Walk or bicycle ride with my husband after work for anywhere from about 30-90 minutes
And sometimes I'll throw some weights and core work in there after the evening walk or bicycle ride.

According to the Exercise report here in MFP over the past 6 days, I've logged the following minutes:

110
86
95
210
130
119

Training sessions can take up to 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. That's during some heavy volume during a peak.

I'd say average is about 90ish minutes five days a week.

Right now I do 45 min to an hour, 3-4x per week lifting.. including warm up and rests, goal is to gain muscle.

When I was losing though after I just had my baby, I did 2, if I was lucky, 3, 30 min lifting sessions per week.. that's all I needed apparently to maintain muscle and decrease BF% quite nicely.

I don't go past 30 minutes.

Weight lifting sessions are an hour long, a couple times a week. Cardio sessions are a half-hour, also twice a week (on other days). Daily, I walk for about an hour outside but that's more for mental health than anything.

Those are about the right lengths of time for what I'm doing, IMO. Can't imagine why I'd need to spend more time on things unless I was dawdling around or whatever. I hit all the major movements with my weights with 3-5x sets. Plenty of cardio; I'm not a specialized endurance athlete. Done.

Me, 30 mins minimum and 1.5 hrs max.

Gym is minimum 1 hour. Sometimes cardio only but minimum burn of 500 cals and heart rate over 170.

Sometimes i walk there and back which is 30 mins each way. If I have the car then i might spend a little longer, perhaps doing more strength training and having a swim after.

Depends on what type of training you're doing. Weightlifting typically takes me anywhere from 30-60 minutes. Cardio becomes less effective the more often you do it, as the body becomes more efficient, so you need to either increase duration or intensity to have the same effect.

i do hot power vinyasa yoga everyday for 60 minutes. every class is unique as is the instructor. somedays on the weekend i may do 2x.