Crystal plasticity and associated finite element simulations allow for a detailed understanding of the micro-mechanical behaviour of metallic materials. However, the stiff and nonlinear constitutive evolution equations for crystal plasticity necessitate small implicit time steps leading to long compute times. This is addressed here by using a finer discretization for the plastic variables (or 'substeps') than the displacement field. This allows one to decrease the time step size for the evolution of the plastic variables without having to increase the number of time steps for the displacement field and, hence, the number of global matrix inversions. The concept is explained in more detail in the attached document. Notably, for a comparable error in the stress field (approximately 1.2 MPa), the solution obtained using 4 substeps ran about 36 % faster than the one obtained using 1 substep (see attached document). Additionally, the proposed substepping method allows for different numbers of substeps at different integration points and for adaptively changing the number of substeps. This is useful if the rate of deformation has significant spatial variation, as is the case here -- the rate of deformation is larger closer to the sphere (see attached document). Results for adaptive substepping and convergence will be discussed in the presentation.