15 workouts in 15 minutes

It’s possible to spend a lot of times building out a workout. You can use all kinds of equipment, determine how many reps you want to do for each, break it all down into supersets, really focus on specific muscles working in very particular ways, create brand new combination moves, you name it.

You also don’t have to do any of that, if you don’t want to.

Now, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that just making time for the workout itself is enough of a commitment on most days — I know that’s the case for me, and I actually enjoy putting together new and exciting workouts! So today, I’m gonna share a workout that I whipped up for myself the other day when I had a spare five minutes. (Seriously — I wrote it up during lunch, and I jotted it down on a napkin so I’d have it handy when I was ready to sweat.)

I knew I would only have about half an hour between finishing work that day and needing to be out of the house to meet a friend, and I really wanted to get my body moving before I left, so I decided that an intense 15-minute AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) workout was just the ticket. A five-minute warm up and a 15-minute workout would leave me with 10 minutes to rinse off, get dressed, and head out the door.

Because I was putting it together so quickly, I didn’t want to spend much time thinking it through, so I stuck with the number 15 and created this 15 in 15 workout, meaning I did 15 reps of each move before moving to the next, and once I completed 15 of everything, I started over again at the beginning until 15 minutes was up. Anything that is an alternating move (like lunges), I did 15 on each side, but if that feels like too much on any of these exercises, you can always drop it to 8 or 10. And, of course, it’s easy enough to swap out any of the moves I chose for ones that you prefer — or think you could use more of in your life, even if “prefer” is too strong a word.