What can I do in 60m day, 3 days per week?

I love Barbell Medicine and The Bridge (I’m coming over from Starting Strength, where I was basically mocked off of the forum by Mark Rippetoe for mentioning RPE) but I only have around 60 minutes three days a week to train. My current program is basically 3x5 with Squat & Press on Monday, Bench & Row on Wednesday, and Deadlift and Lat Pulldown on Friday. After reviewing The Bridge a number of times, I’m not sure how I should best fit those principles into my very limited training time. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Is this a short or long term limitation?

The bridge will work just fine with compressed rest periods (3-4 minutes between sets of RPE 7+), and the GPP Hypertrophy template is excellent too, in addition to the time crunch program.
Jordan has said many times that for a general strength trainee on a time restriction, this would be how he would set it up:

  1. empty bar w/u - 5 minutes, every minute on the minute 5x squats + 5 press
    then
  2. Squat or Deadlift (15 minutes)
    then
  3. Bench or Press (10 minutes)
    then
  4. upper back gpp (optional, but highly recommended. Pendlay Rows for myo-reps is an excellent and time efficient choice here) (5 minutes)

the above should take 40 minutes.

then, 20 minutes of low intensity steady state on the bike or rower to round out the hour.

It goes without saying that the above is A) only a suggestion and B) requires a lot of efficiency and shorter rest periods. RPE will guide the weight selection, so don’t get attached to “I must hit X or I had a bad workout.” You’re aiming for compliance.

It should also be understood that you could modify the above anyway you like and still hit all the goals you want. For a pure strength focus it might be like this

  1. empty bar warm-up 5 minutes
  2. Comp Lift for day 30 minutes (probably 1@8, followed by sets across with 10-25% taken off the top weight)
  3. Supplemental lift for day 20 minutes
  4. GPP (upper back or arms)

Make some sense?

2 Likes

I know ‘The Bridge’ but I don’t have any idea what’s in the Time Crunch template - I’m guessing you’re familiar with both based on your answer. If I don’t really care about sticking with anything super close to my current program, do you thinkTime Crunch be a better option than The Bridge with shorter rest periods?