Strength training routines are typically on the longer side as you need to effectively burn out the muscles you are focusing on in order to get that minor muscle tear that is required to force your body to increase strength. But what if you don’t have the time to get in a full strength routine? Then you do what you can with the time you have. This 10 minute upper body strength workout video is short but it is far better than doing nothing. It is easy to convince yourself that if you don’t have the time to do a workout the best way then you might as well not do it at all but, that could not be further from the truth.

Doing at least a little bit of a routine with whatever time you have tells your body that you need to keep the strength, muscle tissue, tone, and endurance you currently have. If you constantly wait until you have the perfect amount of time to exercise you will just set up unnecessary roadblocks to your health and fitness. The benefits of doing just a little something - as opposed to skipping that day’s routine entirely - not only affects you physically but mentally as well, by keeping your motivation to continue exercising high.

This routine was designed to be done quickly which is why we use timed intervals rather than repetitions to keep us moving. Because of the rapid pace of this routine and the fact that we don’t repeat any exercises, you may want to look through the exercises beforehand and try to come up with a rough guide of how much you want to lift for each movement. This way you don’t have to waste time thinking about this during the routine itself.

Though this video is designed to be done in roughly 10 minutes, remember that you will want to add a warm up and cool down onto your entire routine. Also keep in mind that if you have more time you can turn this into a more traditional strength training routine by just going through it two or three times back to back. 

Workout structure:
- Upper body strength
- 10 different exercises
- 45 seconds on and 15 seconds rest/prep

Equipment:
- Dumbbells
- Exercise bench (optional)

Warm up and Cool down:
- Not included

Workout:
- Wide to close row
- Wide to close press

- Palm in/out pullover
- Wide to close overhead press

- Overhead tricep extension w/ rotation (l)
- Overhead tricep extension w/ rotation (r)

- Overhand curl
- Reverse fly

- Chest fly
- Lateral raises

Calories:
This is a strength training routine so the number of calories you burn per minute will vary depending on how much weight you are lifting. The more you lift the more calories you will burn but also the closer you lift to your maximum, no matter what that is, the more “after burn” effect you will get for the next 24 to 72 hours. With that said most people will fall somewhere between 110-230 total calories burned in the 10 minutes it will take to complete this routine including a warm up and cool down of approximately 5 minutes each.