The Pros and Cons of Splitting up a Workout Throughout the Day

I know I’m not the only person with exercise equipment an arm’s reach (or a short walk) from where they spend most of their day. And you can pop down to your home gym a couple times a day, is that better than doing a whole workout all at once? Or if not better, is it just as good? Sometimes it is! Let’s discuss the nuances.

For purposes of argument, I’ll assume you’re trying to decide between two schedules:

• A traditional strength workout, where you warm up and then do four or five different exercises, with several sets of each. The whole thing might take you anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on what you’re doing and how much.

• The same exercises, but breaking them up—spending, say, 15 minutes on each piece of the workout and then returning to your regular workday. 

The benefits of spreading your workout throughout the day

Working out for 15 minuted probably sounds a lot less intimidating than a whole workout, and that’s likely the most obvious benefit to breaking up your workout. For people with busy or unpredictable schedules (say, someone with a taxing job, or parents with a new baby), it may be easier to find a few small chunks of time to exercise rather than to schedule in a full-length workout.

Here are four reasons to consider splitting up your workout: 

• Each mini-workout is less intimidating, since it will be over in a few minutes.

• It may be easier to fit short sessions between other obligations and activities.

• You’ll get a few mental and physical breaks from your workday (which is healthy if you normally spend the day sitting at a desk).

• You may feel less fatigued at the start of each exercise, because you’ve had an hour or two of rest rather than a few minutes.

The downsides of spreading your workout throughout the day

Those benefits sound great, but there are some pretty significant downsides to splitting up a workout, depending on what kind of workout you’re doing. Most people will probably conclude it’s not worth it for these five reasons: 

• Instead of deciding once that it’s time to go work out, you’ll have four or five opportunities during the day to tell yourself yes or no. Miss one of those, and you’ve only done, say, 75% of your workout. 

• You’ll approach each exercise cold, instead of still being warmed up from the previous one. Warmups aren’t always necessary, but they can help a lot to prepare you, especially for a good strength session.

• You probably won’t get to shower after each mini workout, meaning you might be sitting around in sweaty clothes. It can be nice to do a workout, clean up, and know that you’re done. 

• You’ll spend most of the day knowing that you have another workout coming up, rather than getting it over with early. 

• Some workouts are designed so that each part follows from what’s before it—for example, activating or pre-exhausting a muscle in the first exercise of the day, and then going into the second exercise before you’ve fully recovered. Breaking up the workout can make it less effective or, ironically, encourage you to use more weight or work harder than you would have if you’d done everything in one block. 

Aside from that last point, which only applies to those workouts designed to work as a sequence, most of the reasons for choosing one option over the other come down to time management. Do you think you’ll be more likely or less likely to do four mini workouts than one big one? Are you OK with the tradeoffs—perhaps spending more total time warming up or cleaning up—if they mean you never have to dedicate your entire lunch break to exercise? That’s a decision only you can make.

“Exercise snacks” can be an effective alternative

If you can’t or won’t do a dedicated workout, maybe you can do an exercise “snack” every few hours. 

A lot of recent research has considered ways to get people to exercise more to improve their health. One study had older adults do a 10-minute, no-equipment workout twice a day. The exercises included standing up from a chair over and over, marching in place, and doing calf raises.

At the end of four weeks, the subjects improved their score in a sit-to-stand test by an average 31%. Short workouts are definitely doing something, and are a hell of a lot better than nothing. 

Whether the same strategy works for more athletic people doing work with weights would require more specific study, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it works. 

Mini workouts like “greasing the groove” can improve strength

There’s another type of mini workout that has a lot of backing in the exercise world. So-called “greasing the groove” can help you get better at a specific exercise, like pull-ups. The name reportedly comes from kettlebell coach Pavel Tsatsouline, and the idea is that you pick an exercise to do multiple times a day, but never to failure. So if you can’t do five pullups in a row, you might do one or two pullups every hour or so throughout the day. 

Many people have found this helped them get better at the exercise, likely for two main reasons. One is volume: two pullups an hour for six hours is 12 reps of pullups. Do that every day, and you’ll have done 60 reps during the work week, more than if you just did three sets of five pullups on two or three workout days. Each set might be easy, but they add up. 

The other advantage of greasing the groove is that it gives you a lot of practice at the movement you’re working on. Strength exercises aren’t just about the size of your muscles; they also involve a skill component. Just as you can get better at playing the piano by practicing, you can also get better at an exercise by staying in practice. 

What happened when I tried splitting up my own workouts

That’s a lot of theory. How does this work in practice? I gave it a try myself, and I have two stories to share.

First, I’ve been doing a grease-the-groove protocol with a kettlebell exercise for months now. Anytime I’m sitting at my desk and one of my wearable devices tells me I’ve been sitting too long, I get up and do a bent press (or two, or three) with my adjustable kettlebell. I add weight when it starts to feel too light, but I stick to a weight that feels nice and easy—more like practice than training.

I swear my shoulders feel healthier, and I know I’ve gotten better at this particular exercise. A few months ago, 24 kilograms was a tough weight for me to bent press, so my daily bent presses were with 20 kilograms, one rep at a time. These days, I do 24 for an easy double, three times a day, no warmup required. 

But while writing this article, I also decided to split up my usual workout to see what I thought of the approach. (My workout for the day included four main components that looked like they could be separated without ruining the intention of the workout.)

I did the first exercise—five sets of heavy quarter squats with a barbell—while helping my son with his own workout in our garage gym. I did a set, changed weights, talked to him a bit, did another set, and so on. I was done with my mini workout long before he was done with his. 

A bit later, I did the next exercise, three sets of sit-ups. I didn’t even bother going down to the garage for that one, I just did them on the floor in my office. Later, I did my supersets of pull-ups and dips. 

This is a workout that I normally find pretty intimidating, because it can end up taking a while. (It involves eight sets of pull-ups and dips. I mean, come on.) But taking it on one piece at a time, it didn’t seem nearly so bad—I can handle eight sets of pull-ups and dips if I’m not doing another hard exercise right before and right after. 

That said, I did run into one of the problems noted above: I had to say “yes” to the workout four different times. And at the end of the day, I said “no” to the last part: a 15-minute circuit of core exercises. I had split everything up already, so what would it hurt to do the circuit the next morning? But today is “the next morning,” and I still haven’t done it. I’ll get around to it later. Maybe. Probably. After today’s workout.