The Scraps Workout Method

It might sound a little humble at first, being named after leftovers. However, hidden behind the unglamorous name is a method that might very well help people who have so far failed to establish a strict “3x/week, 1 hour” workout regimen work out consistently. Whether that’s due to a lack of motivation or simply not having the predictability in their lives required to do so at specific times regularly, this method meets people where they are.

The idea here is an “everything’s better than nothing” strategy where you don’t set any expectations for how long or when to work out. Instead, whenever you have some time on your hands during the day, be it 30 minutes or only 5, you flexibly fit in a workout. That way, you can accumulate a significant amount of workout time throughout the week.

While this might not be the fastest way to reach serious bodybuilding goals, it’s not just a homeopathic measure either. After all, it’s widely agreed that any amount of working out is better than none. But perhaps even more importantly, allowing yourself to do even the shortest workouts removes the barrier to starting them (I find it rather hard to come up with an excuse for a 5-minute workout) and therefore allows people to build the consistency they never managed to establish for various reasons. After doing this for a while, it will feel much more normal to you, and even the thought of picking up a more targeted and structured routine suddenly feels doable. Personally, I can see this in the fact that my workouts are getting longer and longer. In the beginning, I would indeed often work out for just 5 or 10 minutes. By now, no longer feeling challenged by 5-minute workouts, neither physically nor mentally, I hardly ever do less than 15 minutes and often much more—on several days per week.

How To Get Started

First off, you’ll need to make sure you have some space nearby that’s ready to go. You’ll definitely find suitable workouts even if you don’t have any equipment at all, so space is really the only thing you need. However, to be prepared for a bigger and more varied selection of exercises, you might want to have a mat ready, and potentially also some dumbbells or resistance bands.

Then you’ll need to know what to do. There’s a seemingly endless amount of pre-designed workouts on the internet for every use case imaginable, matching pretty much any setup requirements you might have, whether on YouTube or on dedicated websites and apps. From there, you could curate a small set of workouts of various lengths, so that whenever you do have time to work out, you can quickly pick the one closest to the amount of time you can commit. However, having these workouts preselected is vital to avoid the temptation not to start: having to find a workout is a task whose time commitment you can’t predict, which might itself become a reason to skip your workout on days when your time is limited.

And that’s already it!

How ichini! Can Help You Apply This Method

The ichini! app was designed from the ground up for this workout method, so it has many features that support it. Most importantly, it will flexibly provide you with a workout of exactly the length you can commit to, be it 5 minutes, 10, or 27, while always making sure to select exercises that complement your other workouts that week and help you work towards your goal—regardless of how many workouts you may have done so far. Those workouts will also match your fitness level, learning from the workouts you’ve done in the past. The app also shows you a simple bar chart with the total number of minutes you’ve worked out each week over the past few weeks, which can be motivating and encourage you to do just a little more than last week. Finally, it allows you to select exercises you really want to do that day and makes sure they’re included in your workout, making the method as comfortable as possible.

But on top of that, it has an additional feature that encourages you to exercise more without the dread of committing to a longer workout: encores. You might be hesitant to choose short workouts, thinking you should be doing more. With ichini!, though, you don’t need to overthink it. Once you’ve started, you might realize that you have more energy than you thought and that it’s not so bad after all. Towards the end of your planned workout, the app will ask you whether you can do one more exercise. This is where you can do second rounds or target body regions that the main workout didn’t touch. And of course, the process repeats until you’re really out of time and/or energy. This way, you can easily increase the amount of time you work out each week without requiring you to bring any more motivation than you normally have.

If you want to try it out, you can do so right in your browser. No account or payment is required for the first 5 workouts, so there’s no risk at all. To continue afterwards, though, you’d need a monthly subscription for $4.99/month.

But whatever tools you end up choosing, the Scraps method remains a powerful way to build consistency, and I can only wholeheartedly recommend giving it a try—especially if you’ve struggled with consistency in the past. Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be the last step in your fitness journey—it might just be the start.