Recently, I had a conversation with a member who told me they weren’t thrilled that our workouts only included about 40 minutes of total work.
They compared that to the 90 minutes they used to spend working out on their own and felt that less time in the gym must mean a less effective workout.
That’s understandable. Our sessions are usually structured around three 10-minute strength supersets, two short cardio blocks, and a 3–5 minute warm-up.
On average, that adds up to 40 minutes of real, focused work. Sometimes members finish a little early and jump into some “extra credit,” but 40 minutes is the true working average.
I asked what this member used to do on their own.
They said they typically performed six different exercises, three sets each—18 total sets—over a 90-minute workout.
So I asked: how long does one working set really take? About 30 seconds on average.
That adds up to 9 minutes of total work over a 90-minute workout.
Let’s compare that to our structure:
- At Pratt Personal Training: 40 minutes of structured work
- On their own: 9 minutes of actual work, spread across 90 minutes
That means they’re doing 4.44 times more actual work with us than they were doing on their own.
But it gets more interesting when we look at time efficiency—how much work gets done per minute of real time:
- With us: 40 minutes of work in 55 minutes = 0.73 minutes of work per minute
- On their own: 9 minutes of work in 90 minutes = 0.10 minutes of work per minute
That makes our workouts 7.3 times more efficient in terms of how productively time is spent.
Eventually, the member admitted that our workouts felt far more challenging and definitely more efficient—but they struggled to get past the idea that a workout “should” last 90 minutes to be considered effective.
It was hard for them to mentally separate the time spent in the gym from the amount of work actually accomplished.
And that’s really the takeaway here.
Some people glorify how long they spend at the gym.
Others overvalue the number of reps they do or how much cardio they squeeze in—without thinking about how focused or productive those reps actually are.
Time alone doesn’t make a workout effective. It’s about what you do with that time—and how structured, intense, and intentional the work is.
If you can do 4.44x the work in a session that takes nearly half the time, and it feels harder and gets better results, that’s not just a better workout—that’s a smarter investment of your time.
– James Pratt