Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - John North on Minimalist Training Programs

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

How little training can you get away with while still making progress or at least maintaining what you’ve already built? There’s been a recent trend in the fitness space that more training volume is better. That’s great if you have lots of time to train, but not everyone wants to spend as much time as possible in the gym. In fact, many people want to know how to optimize their training so they can get more out of less. So, how little training can they get away with? The answer is that it’s less than many people think, and that’s what you’re going to learn about in this podcast. Returning to the podcast is John North, and we’re discussing minimalist training and time-efficient workouts. In case you’re not familiar with John, he and I have been working together behind the scenes for years on articles, books, podcasts, and other content. In fact, he’s the Director of Content for Legion. He’s also completed over 100 triathlons and cross-country, cycling, and adventure races, has squatted and deadlifted over 400 pounds and bench pressed over 300 pounds, and has researched and written for over a dozen organizations, including the National Institutes of Health. So he walks the walk and know a thing or two about both endurance and strength training, and helping people get into the best shape of their lives. In our discussion about minimalist training programs, we chat about . . . - Quality versus quantity when it comes to your workouts - The “minimum effective dose” of training depending on your goals and experience level - How to program short workouts and create effective minimalist programs - Training frequency and splitting up longer workouts into shorter daily sessions - How much training is needed to maintain your physique - And more . . . So, if you’re curious about how much training you really need to do to make progress or just maintain your size and strength, and how to program minimal workouts, you’re going to enjoy this podcast! Timestamps: (0:00) - Join my podcast giveaway! http://muscleforlife.show/giveaway (6:10) - Could you do 15-30 minutes of strength training per day and still produce decent results? (13:18) - Is there significant benefits to training seven 15 minute strength training workouts as opposed to doing two or three longer strength training workouts? (20:17) - What is that threshold range? (35:09) - How would you program shorter workouts? (39:28) - If you’re working out 3 days per week, do you recommend a full-body or split routine? (1:02:36) - Is there anything you would like to add? (1:18:54) - Where can people find your work? Mentioned on the show: I’m giving away over $1,000 worth of prizes to commemorate the 1,000th episode of Muscle For Life! Join the giveaway here: http://muscleforlife.show/giveaway

Hey there and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I am your host Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today to learn about minimalistic training or minimalist training programs. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, a question. How little training do you think that you can do while still making progress? That's one question. The next question, how little training do you think you can do while still maintaining your muscle and strength? Maybe you are not progressing, but you are not regressing. Well, you are going to get evidence-based answers to both of those questions in this podcast.

And if you haven't looked into them much, if you haven't looked into them much, if you haven't looked into the minimal effective dose of training for progress and maintenance, I have good news. It is almost certainly less than you think. It is probably easier to keep gaining muscle and strength, albeit slowly, or to maintain your muscle and strength indefinitely than you think. And I wanted to put this episode out now because there is a trend in the fitness space, or there has been a trend over the last couple of years toward more, just more reps, more sets, more training days, et cetera, et cetera. And more is sometimes better.

And a lot is sometimes appropriate if you need to do a lot to achieve your goals if you have the time to do a lot if you have the inclination to do a lot if you can recover from a lot but the counterpoint to that entire trend of course is less and sometimes less makes a lot more sense for you individually, for your goals, for your circumstances. Sometimes it makes sense to alternate between more and less, to have periods of less training, fewer training days, shorter workouts, depending on what else is going on in your life, and then sometimes doing more based on your goals and how you are feeling and how you are recovering and how much time you have and how much interest you have in spending more time in the gym and so forth. So all that to say is I think this episode has something for everyone, regardless of where you are at right now in your fitness journey and what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve.

This episode will minimally help give you some perspective and maybe help you better plan for future phases of your fitness regimen. And lastly, a little bit about my guest, John North. He is coming back on the podcast. Maybe this is his second or third appearance on the podcast. And I wanted to start having him on the podcast because he knows a lot about this stuff and he works with me. We've been working together behind the scenes on articles, books, podcasts, and other content for years now. He is the director of content for my sports nutrition company, Legion, and he's been walking the walk for a long time. John has competed in over 100 triathlons and cross-country cycling and adventure races.

He's gotten pretty strong. He has squatted and deadlifted over 400 pounds, bench pressure over 300 pounds at a weight of about 170. And I've seen those things. We trained together for years when we lived in Virginia. Now he's in Colorado and I am in Florida. So womp, womp, womp, no more training partner. But it was fun while it lasted. And John has also researched and written for over a dozen organizations, including the National Institutes of Health. Quickly, before we get started,

I want to tell you about a special giveaway that I just launched in celebration of publishing 1,000 episodes of this podcast. 1,000. And to commemorate that illustrious milestone, I'm giving away over $1,000 in prizes. So if you want to enter to win some of those prizes, head over to muscleforlife.show slash giveaway. Muscle for life dot show slash giveaway. Entering is very simple. You simply have to subscribe to the podcast, rate it, and then submit some information to an email address. Takes a few minutes and you will be entered to win. But wait, there is more, because just for entering, you are going to get some free goodies. You are going to get a year's worth

of strength training workouts created by yours unruly. You are going to get 40 different meal plans for different people of different sizes, and you are going to get a special coupon, a special discount code for my sports nutrition company, Legion. So again, head over to muscleforlife.show slash giveaway and enter now. John, podcast number two. Indeed. How's it going, Mike?

Pretty good. You are in the Czech Republic right now. I'm surprised that I'm not getting any lag with your video for such a long distance. I guess you have good internet. Yeah, we actually just upgraded it. So perfect. We are here to talk about shorter workouts. Just as a topic, a lot of people who are into working out tend to go in the other direction. They tend to spend, I would say over the years,

I've come across more people who spend more time in the gym than they really need to, to accomplish their goals at least a decent pace, or they don't feel so good anymore and everything hurts. spectrum, maybe more like a minimum effective dose of exercise. And we could talk about strength training and cardio separately. But for example, could you do 15 to no more than 30 minutes of, let's say, strength training per day? How many days per week? I guess I'll leave that up to you to talk about some different scenarios. If you didn't have much time, could somebody new expect to make decent results with maybe two or three of those short workouts per week? If they could do more, what would you think about doing, let's say, every day, you do 15 minutes of strength training, seven days a week.

And I'll just leave it there and I'll give it over to you. But I think it's a good topic that I haven't explicitly really talked or written much about. And I think it can be useful for people who are new and also people who are experienced who maybe just wanna maintain for a bit and they need time for other things.

And they don't realize that it's much easier to maintain muscle and strength than it is to gain it. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that is probably one of the more important takeaways from this whole discussion is just you don't actually have to do that much to hold on to what you've earned, so to speak, when it comes to strength and especially muscle gain. But yeah, to answer your question on what's essentially like the minimum effective dose to hold on to your gains or even make some progress. Yeah, I mean, 15 to 30 minutes is probably not a bad starting place for most people. That's probably a good baseline, especially if you're doing it every day.

But you don't even necessarily have to do that. I mean, we'll go into some research today that looks at this. I mean, some of it is specifically on answering that question, essentially, what's the minimum amount you need to do. Most of it, of course, like almost all health and fitness research is focused on what's the minimum amount you need to do to stay healthy. That's where most of the funding goes.

Some of it's on how much do you need to maintain muscle mass and strength. And a lot of that actually comes from looking at research on tapering. So athletes who are doing probably a higher volume generally of a volume and intensity of training, and then they're pulling either one or both of those down. Usually they reduce volume, maintain their intensity. And the question is, you know, how much can you, can you dial down your volume so you can be more rested going into a competition without also losing some of your fitness? You know, in the case of powerlifting, for instance, that would be losing strength and muscle mass. But yeah, if you're talking about your average person, yeah, 15 to 30 minutes is

not a bad place to start. And that number, it's not just, obviously, most people listening to this, if you know much about strength training, time is always kind of a tricky way to measure strength training, right? You go into the gym, you know, you could be doing 50 sets in 30 minutes, if you're just doing a bunch of circuits, right? Or you could do, you know, if you're like some powerlifters I used to lift with, maybe you get two sets done in 30 minutes. They were squatting like 800 pounds. They're resting like 15 minutes between each set. So time is kind of maybe a poor way to measure it. But that math, if you break it down, and we can get into more of this, it's really about how many sets you're doing, right?

There's debates about the best way to measure strength training volume. But, you know, number of hard sets per muscle group per week, most of the research indicates that's probably the best way to do it for now. You can do reps and stuff like that too. And a hard set just for people listening, a hard set being a set close to muscular failure, regardless of rep range. Right. It's like the sets that kind of count. And you know, I think anybody who lifts weights, you know what I'm talking about? It's anything other than a warm-up set, basically, or like a speed set. Many people, though, all say, just having worked out in a variety of gyms over the years, many people are doing sets, but not really hard sets, unfortunately,

because they just don't know that you need to push beyond the point where it's just kind of hard and kind of uncomfortable to get a truly effective or at least to maximize the training stimulus. You got to push to where it's very hard and you're getting close to failure. And I see many people do not do that. Yeah, true. That's actually a really good point. And it's something that is especially relevant when you're talking about time efficient training, so to speak, because I think this is a major problem. And I know you've had discussions like this with people as well, where I'll talk to somebody and they'll say, oh, I only have time for one or two workouts. So I rest not at all between sets, basically. I just

jump from set to set to set. And I don't train that heavy because I'm trying to just get as much done as I can in that period of time. And that's not completely wrongheaded, right? For most things, the more you do, so to speak, the more activity you cram into it, often the better your results are. And it's more true for endurance sports, definitely. But in the case of strength training, that's not true, right? Like the quality really matters. And that's what you were just describing is they need to be quality sets or hard sets. As you said, you're using proper technique, you're taking them relatively close to failure. So throughout this discussion, that's something I would say people should have in the back of their mind is that when we say a set, that's what we're talking about. It's not warmups. It's not relatively lightweight for circuits or something like that. It is stereotypical strength training taken fairly close to the point where you're contracting your muscle as hard as you can. It's not moving close to that, not necessarily to that point, but fairly close to it.

that, you know, not necessarily to that point, but fairly close to it. So yeah, anyway, going back to answer your question, yeah, 15 to 30 minutes, it's not a bad place to start. If you do, you know, we can get into more of the math here, but roughly a minimum for most purposes, and this is a good rule of thumb, is probably about two sets per muscle group per week. And if you're resting, you know, about two minutes for each, between each set, let's say you break that between four exercises or so, again, the math isn't going to perfectly add up. It also depends on how you calculate volume for different muscle groups. So one example would be if you do a set of bench press, how do you calculate how many sets that is for your triceps? And some people will say that's just one set. I would tend to disagree.

I mean, it's not wrong necessarily. There isn't a perfect way to calculate this. But Lyle McDonald, who's a guy I've followed for a long time and I think is right on this topic, says you should probably discount those sets for kind of like secondary muscle groups. Whenever I put together a training program, that's what I do is I'll look at it and I essentially use like a multiplier for those.

So it's like if you're doing, let's say a set of squats, for instance, I don't count that as one set for your erectors in your back or your back musculature, that'd be like half a set, something like that. So same idea. Yeah. With this, with triceps. So anyway, that's probably more detailed than we need to really get into, but just to give people a general idea, it's roughly two per muscle group per week. If you do roughly two sets for each exercise and a workout, and then you do

four exercises, you know, eight sets total, rest about two minutes, that'd be like 16 minutes. And then if you're a more advanced trainee, or you have maybe a bit more time, or maybe you're not training as often throughout the week, so you're just doing two or three workouts instead of, you know, four or five or even six, you can maybe, you know, stretch that out to like 30 minutes. Maybe you're doing four sets, four exercises, three times a week, something like that. A really key point here too, is this is very much a situation where there's not a one size fits all answer. I mean, that's a very cliche thing to say, but it's true in this case, because it really depends on your goals, right? So are you trying to just stay healthy? Are you trying to keep making some progress, but maybe just minimize the amount

of time you're training? Or maybe you're just trying to maintain what you have. Maybe you're traveling or you're working on an oil rig or something out in the middle of the Atlantic and you don't have access to a good gym and you just want to keep the gains you have with as little training as possible. So it really depends on how you're approaching it. And do you think there would be significant benefits to doing, let's say, six or seven 15-minute strength training workouts. Let's just say it's seven for a total of 100 minutes or so of training. So an hour and a half or so of training per week versus doing two or three longer strength training workouts. Because like many strength training programs for beginners, many of them are three workouts per

week, which makes sense. It's definitely not necessary to train five times per week if you're new. You can if you just like it, and maybe you'll be able to grow some smaller muscle groups a little bit faster. But on the whole, your progress is probably not going to be that different between if you're new, right? A well-designed three workout per week program versus five. But do you think if let's say we took that three workout per week program and again, turned it into a seven day or six days per week, but shorter, just 15 minutes. And, and, and there are reasons why people might want to do that. I mean, I personally wouldn't want to drive to the gym to do a 15 minute workout, but some people would because it actually works

better for them. They're driving from... Let's say they're driving home after work and they pass the gym. They have to drive anyway. And they don't have that much time. That works well for them. Or they have a home gym and they don't like doing long workouts. And this just sounds interesting. Like, oh, I could just... 15 minutes. That I can commit to every day without a problem. But committing to an hour, two or three days per week is a bit harder. Yeah, yeah, and that gets to the kind of frequency debate, right, of what's the ideal distribution

of your training volume throughout the week. It's really the same question, right? Like, usually that's discussed in the context of maybe a more advanced weightlifter who's trying to maximize their progress and generally as a tool for maximizing volume, right? If you do more workouts per week, you can maybe do a bit more in each workout, the idea being that that'll lead to better progress over time. But it's the same question for a beginner in this case, right? Like, is it better to do shorter workouts more often? Or is it can you get the same results with fewer workouts slightly

longer? I mean, I would argue, if you're not sure, I would go with fewer workouts, say like three 30 minute workouts per week versus like 120 minute workout or 115 minute workout every day. A for what you said, logistical reasons that usually isn't really optimal for most people. Like most people don't live right next to a gym, they're not necessarily driving by. And even if you are driving by, you still have to get your gym clothes on, unless you're like you and I used to be where we just go to the gym and gym clothes and then you sit in that all day and work at your desk. That's the best way to do it. But if you want to be a little more dainty, then you get cleaned up and stuff. So there's logistical issues around that. But from a behavioral perspective, as you

said, many people do prefer that, right? Just doing the same thing every day is very simple from a habit forming standpoint. So I would argue, if you're not sure, do a bit less just because for most people, also even from a habit standpoint, life happens, so to speak, right? Almost anybody can commit to like three workouts a week, right? So even if your schedule just gets completely obliterated one day, you can just make it up the next day. And, you know, it gives you a lot of flexibility when you have four days that you don't necessarily have to be training. So that's why I lean towards just keeping it simple with three days a week. The other reason is it really just doesn't make a difference for beginners, right? Like, even training, probably once per week versus twice per week for a beginner, the difference, it's probably

fairly significant twice per week versus once per week. When it's like two versus three, the difference is maybe a little bit better in favor of three. And then if it's like three versus four versus five for a beginner, probably doesn't matter. Volume matters a bit, but even then, right? Like there's a fair amount of research at this point showing that especially among beginners, like 20 sets for muscle group per week, A is just way too much for beginners, but even 12 versus eight versus 6, the point of diminishing returns, you hit that very quickly for a beginner. So yeah, maybe I'm rambling a little bit. But the answer to your question is, physiologically, there's almost certainly not a significant difference between doing 30 minutes three times a week and 15, 20 minutes every day.

Habitually, that's just something the person would have to decide for themselves, right? Yeah, at that point, I would say it doesn't really matter. Yeah, some of the arguments I've seen are more applicable to experienced weightlifters. Like some people, they say, oh, well, there's going to be less muscle soreness with higher frequency. Yeah, but if you're new, and you're following a well designed program, you're not going to be getting that sore. Like, yeah, your first two weeks, you're like, oh, wow, I'm actually feeling this. Probably by month two, you just get a little bit sore from your workouts and you're not hobbling around. Whereas if you're experienced, and let's say you need to do 20 hard sets for a major muscle group

just to progress, yeah, there is going to be a difference in soreness between doing two 10-set workouts for your chest, for example, which wouldn't necessarily be a terrible idea versus maybe doing five sets four days a week or doing six to seven sets three days a week. And if you apply that to, let's say, a big muscle group, to your lower body, if you apply that to, let's say, a big muscle group, to your lower body, whether two versus three times per week, it might produce the same results ultimately. But if you're quite sore on the two times per week, and if that is just not nice, and it's something you don't like, then you can get around that by increasing frequency, right? then you can get around that by increasing frequency, right? So like that, that's one thing I know people will say in advocacy of higher frequency always is just better for everybody,

period. Yeah, I would say, on the whole, I'm very sympathetic to a lot of the arguments I've heard in favor of higher frequency training. And maybe some of that is coming from kind of endurance sports background, where I actually think there's even more validity to it from a technique and just a lot of reasons for that. The main one I would say is actually the same for endurance sports and strength training, which is just fatigue management. So it's not as much soreness, although I do think that's a factor in that you could consider that maybe a component of fatigue as well. You know, if you go into a, especially like a lower body workout where you're doing six sets of squat variations, maybe like three sets of regular squats, three sets of front squats, some lunges, like a long leg workout just sucks. Like even if you're in a weightlifting, it just beats you up. So yeah, like splitting that up throughout

the week is generally helpful. But again, that comes down to mostly a function of volume. And there is also an interesting counter argument to the idea of doing higher frequency, which is, again, there's no direct evidence of this that I'm aware of, but there are some theoretical reasons or arguments why there might be some kind of minimum threshold for volume per session that you need to hit in order to optimally stimulate progress. I know Mike Israetel, Lyle McDonald, again, they, I think, tend to favor that argument, whereas others, I know Menno Henselmans, who's also a very smart guy who I follow as well, he tends to believe there's not enough evidence to say that should really be a factor when determining your programming and that really it's just about your

volume, you know, across time, whether that's like a week, two weeks, whatever, just whatever time span you look at. And what is that threshold according to Israetel, McDonald and others? Or what do they suspect it might be in a range? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know Lyle has an article on that. I forget. He has a long series of articles on training volume that I definitely recommend for anyone listening to this

if they want to dig into the nitty gritty. And I believe he also touches on frequency there as well. And he gives some numbers. Again, we don't have any studies that have specifically examined this. So it's really like trying to read between the lines and look at a bunch of different research and what these numbers might be. Also, it's, you know, we don't have any studies that have like specifically examined this. So it's really like trying to read between the lines and look at a bunch of different research and what these numbers might be. Also, it's a moving target, right? Like it's going to be different almost certainly for a beginner versus a more advanced trainee. So it's very difficult to

try and figure out what that is. I would argue, or I wouldn't be surprised, I wouldn't argue, I wouldn't be surprised if it's also somewhat muscle group specific, right? Like my arms definitely do not grow as fast as my legs do. So I wouldn't be surprised if it's also somewhat muscle group specific, right? Like my arms definitely do not grow as fast as my legs do. So I wouldn't be surprised if maybe my threshold, if that exists, my workout threshold, right? The amount of volume I need to do for my arms is maybe just higher. So I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion on those arguments. I find them both interesting. From what I've seen playing with my own programming and working with other people is it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

Now, I'm always hesitant to use that as an argument for or against something, right? Because, again, even if you're, say, like an accomplished personal trainer and you've worked with a few hundred people as a sample size, is that whenever you're trying to draw conclusions about this stuff, I'm always very, very worried about that. So you do have to kind of go back to the theory, you know, because there's so many variables there, too. And you're working with hundreds of different people, men, women, old, young, you know, people following their diets, people not following it. It's very hard to rely on that for drawing conclusions. So I think that's where going

and looking at the theoretical evidence becomes very helpful. Again, I think this is where my position is probably. It is more of whatever suits your preferences and your goals. And also too, one other thing that you alluded to in the beginning that I think is important to keep in mind, many people, maybe even the majority of

people are not just strength training, they are doing other things, right? So maybe they like hiking on the weekend, maybe they play a sport like soccer or something as well. And that's where you do have to start weighing the benefits of these different strategies against that as well, or and trying to incorporate that not just, well, I'm going to do whatever is supposedly optimal for strength training, and then just shoehorn my other training into my schedule. You have to take both of those things into consideration. So let's say, just as an example, one downside of, say, doing high-frequency training, let's say you're a runner or something like that, or you're a cyclist, and you're training your legs almost every day, that might not be optimal. It might actually be better to try and separate your lower body strength training

a bit more from your running just so you're not fatigued for one or the other. And, you know, you can distribute that however you want, whatever makes sense, like whatever your goals are, whether you're prioritizing the running or the strength training. But that's probably the whole frequency debate is maybe we could do a whole podcast on that.

Those are my working thoughts right now. Again, I wouldn't say I have an extremely strong opinion on it. You know, another scenario where somebody might prefer to do shorter strength training workouts more frequently would be, let's say they have 30 or 40 minutes and they can, they could do that. Let's just say four or five, six, maybe even seven days per week, but, but they only have 30, 40 minutes and they want to do some strength training and some cardio and it's easiest for them. And I thought of this because there are some people who go to my gym, I'm speaking like these are them, right? Where they want to do some strength training, they also want to do some cardio. And if they're in the gym, it's easiest for them because they're going to take a

shower and they're going to leave. It's easiest for them to do both while they're there. And so in that scenario, that could be 15 to 20 minutes of strength training followed by some cardio. And I'm thinking of people, they'll go and walk on an inclined treadmill or just do some rowing or do some biking. And that also is something that it might be good for people to know that you can make that work. You don't have to just choose one or the other, or you don't have to be concerned that 15 or 20 minutes of strength training, especially again, if you're new, especially if it's followed by cardio, it's not enough to do anything. Maybe that would be one of the other kind of baseline principles people should keep in mind here is that anything is better than nothing. So even if you're doing literally one set for each muscle group per week, you are still going to see some progress. I mean, there are studies, I've shared some of this with you too, and we've talked about it where, you know, you can have people who are sedentary and they just start riding a bike and they'll build muscle, like sometimes fairly significant, right? They'll see like a 10% increase in local muscle growth.

So like you measure some particular muscle and it'll get significantly bigger just from that because the stimulus is, you know, they're so responsive to any kind of resistance training and that, you know, stereotypical resistance training. So lifting weights or riding a bike or even walking at a moderate pace is a form of a resistance training.

So, I mean, look at look at the muscle wasting effects or the detraining effects. This has been shown in research. I know you've seen this when you compare people who are bedridden, completely sedentary to people who just were walking. It's shocking how quickly you lose muscle when you just don't move around. And then it's also a little bit surprising how well you can maintain muscle just going about your normal daily life without any training. It takes several weeks until you really start to lose actual muscle tissue. But if you sit in bed all day and don't move, it probably kicks in. I think if I remember, it's like several days you start to lose muscle tissue.

Yeah, definitely. And anyone who's broken a bone, I actually, I'm fairly lucky I haven't, but I've had friends who have, of course. And just getting your arm out of a cast, apparently it feels like that, right? It's just a significant muscle loss. I fractured my wrist when I was like 20, 21. I was in a full arm cast for six weeks. I should have gotten pictures

because it was hilarious. So I had been weightlifting for a few years at this point. So I had more muscle than the average person. I wasn't this point. So I had more muscle than the average person. I wasn't jacked, but I had more muscle than the average person. And my left arm was completely atrophied. I looked like the meme of the dude who jerks off. The Coomer meme.

My right arm looks twice as big as my left arm. It was good. I should have gotten pictures. That's perfect that it happened to your left arm too, from a meme perspective. That's a good example of, yeah, just how bad inactivity is for maintaining muscle. And a good rule of thumb,

just so people can have that in their head. And it's something that I've shared with a few folks who, there was one guy we used to lift with, or we'd see at the gym sometimes. I remember he would be gone for like a week and he'd come back and we'd say like, oh, hey, how's it going, man? And he'd be like, oh, I feel like I just lost everything.

I feel so small. I'm just so glad to be back here. It's, you know, it's just funny when you hear that, right? Because when you look at the research, again, it's going to depend on the specifics of how active or inactive you are. But when it comes to losing muscle mass, generally you're looking at about two months

of not lifting weights before, you know, you probably start losing maybe a bit before that. but in terms of losing enough that it really matters that it's even measurable, you know, probably like six to eight weeks. And then for strength, maybe like three to four to five weeks, something like that as well. Now, granted, you can feel a little bit rusty. What throws people off though is size, muscle size, because the fluid, you start to lose that fairly quickly, the residual pump that you normally have from working out. So you can look quite a bit smaller after just a week, certainly two weeks off the gym, but that doesn't mean that you lost. If you got a DEXA scan, it actually

would register as lean mass, but... Yeah, lean mass loss. Yeah. There's a difference between having less glycogen and less water in your muscles and less of that residual pump and actually losing contractile tissue. Right. Yeah, the stuff we think of when it comes to muscle mass. So yeah, and that's also why, again, it's another good example where looking at yourself or your personal anecdotes is actually very misleading in that case, where if you just look in the mirror, you're like, oh man, I lost all my muscle. I feel so small. When you actually

look at the research, when again, DEXA, as you said, it's not perfect, especially when you're looking at an individual, it's very flawed. But if you look at a larger group of people, that's really where it shines and where it's helpful. So if you have, you know, 15, 20 people, you look at DEXA scans for all of them over a period of time, then you can start to actually see some averages. Because even if it's off, it's generally going to be consistently off. So TLDR, when you start looking at actual muscle loss, it takes, as you said, weeks, if not even maybe a month or two before you see significant losses. And the reason that's relevant to this discussion is just it shows you how low the bar is for maintaining it. I mean, you can literally stop lifting weights

entirely for a month or two and really not lose much at all. If you're just looking at what's the minimum amount I have to do to maintain, it's not that much. It's probably only to give numbers, right? It's probably no more than six, maybe as few as three hard sets per major muscle group per week to maintain more or less all the size and a fair amount of the strength. If you are also training, if you're using your normal heavier training weights, you just are doing very little volume. Six, there's no question from the research I've looked at. And I think you could make an argument for as low as three, three hard sets per week. Like,

oh, you want to maintain your lower body? Do three hard sets of squats per week. Literally, that's it. you want to maintain your lower body, do three hard sets of squats per week. Literally, that's it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, it depends on how you want to measure it. I mean, yeah, I think three is absolutely a fine number to work with. Like we were saying, if two is kind of your for a beginner, that's your maybe your absolute minimum for making progress. Yeah, three is probably like a good general recommendation for most people, assuming a fair number of those people have also been like they've reached a certain level of competency, right, with strength training. So you're also you're including everybody in that. What I would generally recommend for people, and this is what most

tapering research is on. So again, that's going back to athletes who are preparing for competition, and they're pulling their volume down trying to see, in many cases, what that is, it's kind of a game of figuring out what's the minimum I can do. So I feel really rested and fresh, while still holding on to my fitness. So in the case of strength training, there's not that much research, but there's actually one study. Let me see when this came out because I think it was actually a fairly recent study from the, yeah, when was this?

2011. So not that recent, but it was from the University of Alabama at Birmingham where they looked at this exact issue. So it was people doing about nine sets per workout for five months. And then they did, you know, they split them into a few groups. They had one group, one that did no exercise. I'm just looking at my notes here. And then one that did, yeah,

so one that basically kept doing what they were doing before. They kept their volume the same. And then another group cut it by about 66%. So they went down to exactly what you said, where it was just three total sets. And these are all leg exercises. They just focused on one muscle group, but it's fair to extrapolate this to other muscle groups as well.

And they really found there is almost no difference between the group that maintained their volume and the group that cut it by about two thirds. So they're doing only a third as much volume as they were before, which is kind of annoying when you think about it and you're like, God, I'm doing like three times more training than I really need to. Again, I would say over time, you're almost certainly gonna make better progress with the higher volume. And there's other factors there too. What was their diet like?

Blah, blah, blah, all the normal. I mean, it would be hard to tell experienced weightlifters. Oh yeah, you can make slow and steady progress on three sets per week. That I don't think. Even six, I doubt. Probably once you start to get around 10 to 12. Now you're in a range that is going to be more productive. But you know, it might take a little bit more than that for some

people, some muscle groups. Yeah, for some people in some muscle groups, too, as we were saying, and yeah, that's another one of these benchmarks to think with is, you know, I think the body of evidence at this point is fairly clear that roughly 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week is a good range to think with. Now, that's where you fall there is going to vary. So it's kind of like setting your calorie intake. You can use different rules of thumb, but your exact numbers are going to vary depending on your activity levels, etc. So it's the same idea here with setting your volume per muscle group per week.

Yeah. So if you're a more advanced training, you've been training for a longer period of time, training properly for a longer period of time, you're closer to your genetic potential for muscle growth, you're probably going to be toward the higher end of that spectrum, maybe like 12, 15 sets per muscle group per week, maybe even a bit more for certain muscle groups. From what I've seen, I have met very few natural weightlifters who can do much more than about 15 sets per muscle group per week consistently for all of their muscle groups, right? So seems to be more common, again, among naturals.

If you're on PEDs, that's a very different story. Or again, if you are not training at the intensity that we've been talking about, again, I see people in the gym who, if they are on drugs, that's a waste of drugs, who are probably doing 20 to 30 hard sets, not for all major muscle groups, but for some. I'm thinking of some guys, some of their upper body, they're always doing. And they are not, though, doing a lot of compound exercises. They're doing

a lot of its isolation work. And a lot of those sets are not close. They're probably four to five plus reps from failure. So sure, you can do, you could probably do 100 sets per week for a muscle group if the sets are easy enough. Yeah, I mean, you could even use endurance training as an analogy for this, right? Like you look at a professional cyclist, they do way more sets of lower body exercises than most weightlifters because it's super light and low resistance compared to a weightlifting workout. Yeah, on the extreme, just to argument ad absurdum, basically.

Most people, though, 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week is a good guideline. That would be like maximizing progress, right? So if you're bulking, you're in a calorie surplus, you're sleeping properly, you'd want to be somewhere in there most of the time. And again, if you're maybe a bit more advanced, probably you have most body parts at like 10, 12, 15 sets per muscle group per week. And then maybe you have one or two that are your kind of stubborn muscle groups that you have even 18, 20 sets per muscle group per week. And then maybe you have one or two that are your kind of stubborn muscle groups that you have even, you know, 18, 20 sets per week, probably not a good idea to maintain that for too long. And again, it also comes back to how do you calculate volume, right?

Because I know some people calculate it as like a one to one. So you do one set of bench press, any muscle group affected that counts as one set. And then you have people like myself, Lyle McDonald, who would calculate that a bit differently, that would be like one set for chest, half a set for shoulders and triceps is probably how I would count that. Hey there, just a quick reminder. Don't forget to enter my podcast giveaway. I am giving away over $1,000 in prizes to commemorate my 1000th episode of Muscle for Life. And to enter to win, you just have to head over to muscleforlife.show slash giveaway. And you're going to get some free bonus goodies for entering. So you will get a chance to win over $1,000 in prizes. Plus you'll get instant access to some pretty cool stuff that I think you're going to like, including workouts and meal plans and

a special coupon code, a special discount for my sports nutrition company, Legion. Let's get back though to, so if you're programming shorter workouts, how might that look? So for people who want to give it a try, maybe we could start people who are brand new versus people who are experienced. So for the brand new person, this is somebody who's looking to make progress and they certainly can make progress on just a few even, let's just say anywhere from three plus if they're just doing 15 to 20 minutes of strength training per week,

how might those workouts look? And then maybe we could talk about experienced, more experienced weightlifters who are thinking maintenance. All right, I wanna do the bare minimum amount of strength training just to maintain my physique, to maintain most of my strength, but I want to free up time where I just don't have the time to do what I normally do, but I don't want to be out of the gym completely for three months. Yeah. So for beginners, I would say number one, in terms of exercise selection,

there's really no point, I would say, in doing isolation exercises at that point. Now, the whole point of doing any kind of isolation exercises, so for listeners, that would be, you know, isolation isn't really the proper term, but it would be like an accessory exercise or a single joint exercise. Something that, you know, the amount of muscle mass you're using, the amount of joints involved is fairly limited. Something like a biceps curl versus a pull-up, which would be more of a multi-joint exercise. So your elbows, your shoulders are involved, all the muscle groups associated that are connected across those joints. So you'd really want to focus on the latter. So multi-joint, compound, full body, however you want to call it, these exercises that use as much muscle mass as possible just because they are more efficient. And as far as movement patterns, maybe something that you have

that you're pressing out in front of you, pressing overhead, some sort of squat, some sort of hip hinge. And sure, if you can just do the big boring basics, if you can just barbell squat and barbell deadlift, bench press, overhead press, then great, do those things. If you can't do any of those exercises for any reason, that's okay, but you can't do any of those exercises for any reason, that's okay. But you

can still do something that uses those patterns and probably ideally would use free weights. But even if that doesn't work, you still use those movement patterns and use machines again, especially if you're new, right? Yeah. Or even body weight too. I mean, as you said, it's probably good to think with like a vertical and a horizontal push and press. So you have a vertical press, so straight up and down, be like an overhead press of some kind, horizontal, so like something like a push-up or a bench press. You have a horizontal pull, which would be like a bodyweight row or a dumbbell row, a vertical pull, which would be like a lat pull-down or a chin-up or a pull-up, and then some kind of squatting motion, so that could

or squat slash lunge, right? So anything that is kind of like a, almost like a leg pressing motion and then a hip hinge. So like deadlift, Romanian deadlift, dumbbell deadlift, things like that. So if you get, and again, obviously you don't need to do all of those and probably best for beginners not to do all of those necessarily in the same workout. It just ends up being a bit more than you need.

You can spread that out throughout the week. But so that would be exercise selection. And then in terms of volume. So again, if we're looking at maybe two to three sets per muscle group per week, probably more like two if you're a beginner, if we're talking about the bare minimum to either maintain or make small amounts of progress. So probably something like three to four exercises per workout. And again, my recommendation to most people would be to do what I would say is maybe

the maximum frequency necessary to get the volume in in a way that is logistically feasible for you. So again, it really depends on personal preference. But let's just work around three days per week, because I do think that it tends to work really well for most people like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, then you still have the weekends off, you have a bit of wiggle room. So this is going to be six to eight sets per workout, three days a week. Yeah. So again, if you're looking at three days a week,

it's just a simple thing to work with. So probably, as you said, three or four exercises, maybe two sets per exercise. And also rest periods, I would say, for most people, if you're a beginner, you can, in some cases, get away with maybe just a minute of rest or so between exercises because you're just not using enough weight to really generate the kind of metabolic fatigue that

really is what necessitates longer rest periods, metabolic fatigue and also muscular fatigue as well. So yeah, and then also generally, you know, just basic programming principles. So starting each workout with generally the more challenging exercises. So something if you're, you know, barbell squatting, that's generally going to come first. Same with deadlifting. Some of that's just down to personal preference. And if it's three days per week, what are your thoughts on the split, so to speak?

Not that that matters per se, but a lot of people, it makes it easy for them to think about, okay, we have a push workout, we have a pull, we have a legs, that'd be one way of doing it. Or should it be three full body or? Yeah, yeah. What I would say is, in general, for beginners, I would say the most efficient way, especially if you're doing fairly low

volume would be more of a full body, maybe higher frequency is a better, more accurate way to put it because full body is a little bit misleading, because it's usually not actually full body. Like you're hitting every single muscle group. Uh, you know, we've talked about this before, right? It's a little bit of a misnomer, but it's just, it's just kind of a mishmash. Uh, so you just call it full body. Exactly. Yeah. It doesn't fit into a clean category, like a lot of workout splits. So push, pull legs is a great way to do it. And honestly, push, pull legs programs for beginners kind of fit this mold. I mean, BLS is like this, right?

It's almost like built on the backbone of a traditional push-pull legs routine, but it's more, it's like somewhere between full body and push-pull legs. BLS being bigger, leaner, stronger, obviously your program. So for a beginner, you know, let's say you're just doing Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three days a week, you know, your first workout, you know, I'll probably mess it up if I try to actually program out every single workout in the week. But yeah, just want to give people an idea of what these workouts. So okay, good. We know we have six to eight sets per workout. Okay, we have some exercises, but how might that look?

Right, right. So yeah, you could do, say Monday might be like bench press, two sets of that. And again, we're saying sets, we're talking about harder sets, warm ups would be something a bit separate. Actually, it might even be worth mentioning real quick, especially if you're a beginner, you really don't need to spend much time warming up. That's something people waste a lot of time with, where the warmup becomes like its own little workout where you have to go through this whole routine. I have my own thoughts on that. I think warmups are over-prioritized, you could say. I think for most people, even advanced weightlifters, you're usually fine after two or three sets. It's largely personal preference, but I think physiologically,

you get most of the benefits after probably even one or two warm-up sets. I'll chime in and say that lower body, if I'm squatting what is going to be relatively heavy weight for me, I've tried this before, one warm-up set is not enough for me. Like I've, I've not hurt myself, but I've not even gotten to the point of tweaking things, but had things kind of hurt like, Ooh, that didn't, that didn't feel good. Like I just felt stiff in my knees, my back, my hips. I'm always squatting. What's for me relatively heavy weight, even if it's for a set of 10, that's still heavy enough that I like to do three, usually not four, but three. Like I like to do two lighter warm-up sets. Maybe they're eight or 10 reps. And obviously

the load is not heavy, but I'm not getting close to failure, obviously. But then I like to load it up heavier. And that might be 80% of one RM for one, just to acquaint myself with a heavier load and then get into my working sets. Yeah. And maybe I would add a caveat, which is just that the closer you're getting to your 1RM, your 1RM max, like the maximum amount of weight you can lift, and also the more technical the exercise, I would argue those are the times when more warmups, generally most people prefer more warmups at that point. I'm the same way. Like if I'm going for a squat one around, there'll be usually at least three warmups sets or so. And it really depends how heavy I'm going. But for me, I'll do that even if it's a six or it's an

eight or even if it's a 10. Again, I've just I've tried the one set with a 10 where I'm going for 10s. And that's with 70 75% of one or, whatever. I've tried one warmup set and then squatting 10s and it just didn't feel as good as the two or three warmup sets and then the squat. Yeah. Again, I would agree. It's definitely a personal preference as well. It's going to depend on the individual. And also squats are, I would argue, one of the more technical exercises you can do. So for myself, to use a counter example would be something like pull-ups, where I never warm up for pull-ups. I usually just go into the gym cold.

Bench press, I've found I could do one, maybe two max on the bench press. Doesn't bother me. I think not warming up might be becoming a little bit of a trend or something. But some people, I've seen some people, even in the Evans space, say you don't need to warm up for the bench unless you're going for a one or M. But even if you're doing fives or something, just hop on the bench and go. I don't think I would get hurt per se, but it wouldn't feel good. Yeah, I would say that, again, the main reasons to warm up, I would argue, are A,

your joints do feel a little bit more comfortable when they're warmed up. I would say most people feel that way. There is a little bit of research showing that your risk of injury is a bit higher when you're using like your muscles and connective tissues are colder. I've actually seen a little bit more of that in reference to endurance training, specifically with how to dress for cold weather, for instance. So the more evidence-based recommendation nowadays would be to overdress a little bit, specifically for injury prevention, actually, because your joints, it's better to be a little bit sweaty and warm and then you'll have cold joints, but that's a slightly separate issue. So then for newer people then just coming back, so they could get away with maybe a minute,

minute and a half of rest with the purpose of doing these shorter workouts and making them as productive as possible in that 15 to 20 minutes that they have. Yes. Yeah. And another thing too, that is definitely worth using, whether you're a beginner or not, but especially if you're trying to save time are antagonist paired sets, which I know you've talked about before on the podcast, but essentially it's just a fancy way of saying, I mean, antagonist paired sets are specifically where you train one muscle group and then you train the antagonist of that muscle group in your next set. There's multiple ways of doing it. I know some people advocate for doing, say, one example would be like bench press and dumbbell rows. It's a very simple example. Or

triceps extensions and dumbbell curls, something like that. So thinking of pairs of muscles that perform opposite functions. Exactly. Yes. And there's some research that actually can improve performance on a subsequent exercise. Not really worth getting into the specifics. I think you did a podcast with Menno where you touched on some of that as well,

Menno Henselman's. You can go listen to that. But for the purposes of this discussion, I would say the main takeaway is just essentially you're training one muscle group while the other one is resting. And the way I personally like to do it, I don't generally,

and this is just personal preference, I actually do think there's some merit to doing that even from a performance standpoint of combining these antagonist muscle groups in your training. But I like it just combining muscle groups that are not close to each other. So you could do like curls and calves, for instance, like as far apart as possible, allows you to rest a bit longer while making better use of your time in the gym. So in this case, let's say you're not doing isolation exercises like that. You do something like bench press, you knock out two sets of that, maybe you do one to three warmup sets. And also to just to wrap up on the warmup thing. It also really depends how strong you are. Like let's say your one art max on the bench press is 95 pounds, you might be able to get away with just one set of warmups at that point where you're really, you know, you're just, you're doing five with the bar or

something like that. And then you work your way up to 95. But as you get stronger, usually the people doing the most warmups who really need to do the most warmups are the stronger people in the gym, people who are more closer to their natural potential for muscle growth. So going back to rest periods and antagonist paired sets. So yeah, a way you could do that would be, let's say you're doing bench press, you could do dumbbell rows. So that would be like an upper body pulling exercise. And then you could do, you know, it could be a pull up or a lat pull down or whatever. Right, right.

Yeah. Some kind of pulling exercise. Yeah, it doesn't have to be like, if you're doing a pushing exercise and a pulling exercise, they don't both have to be horizontal. One could be vertical. It doesn't really matter. And there's nothing magical about that, right? You also have exercises that are somewhere in between, like an incline bench press is a good example. It's somewhere in between a

vertical and horizontal. The idea is you're just training these muscle groups through different ranges of motion and through at different angles because there is research. A, you know, it's a good way to avoid overuse injuries. There's not a whole lot of research on that, but varying your training and rotating through different exercises probably is a bit better for joint health. And then also, it's just a good way to make sure your muscles are well-rounded, so to speak. They're just getting trained in different ways. And there's some research that does show that is better for muscle growth over time. But anyway, so you could start with something like a bench press. Then maybe you do a lat pulldown or a dumbbell row. then you could do maybe dumbbell lunges or squats.

If you're doing squats, you should probably do that first generally. But let's say you're doing a different lower body exercise, like lunges. You know, in that case, one good way to do it would really be almost like you could call it like a slow circuit in a way where you do like a set of bench press, rest maybe 90 seconds, then you do a set of dumbbell rows, rest like 90 seconds, then a set of lunges, rest 90 seconds. And then you just do that once more and that's it.

And then you're done. And generally, people who are into strength training, like more traditional strength training, don't like circuits. And there's a good reason for that because generally, the way most people do them,

they're not great for muscle growth where you're just jumping from one exercise right to the next and you have no rest periods. And generally, you're not using very much weight. That's not ideal. But in this case, that's why, again, slow circuit is one way you could describe it where you are giving yourself more rest.

And in a way that you could argue that would be better even, you know, because you're resting. Because when you come back around for those second sets, yeah. Yeah, you've rested four and a half minutes between sets of bench press. So you should definitely be ready to go. So that would be, if I were doing it, that would be how I would probably program it. And again, that would be with three exercises. If you have the time, you can do something else too. Maybe like a hip hinge motion or something like that. Or honestly, if you want, you can always throw in an isolation exercise if you just enjoy it too.

So it's not like you can't do those, it's just they're generally not as efficient. So that would be programming that exercise. That would be another thing too, is generally, if I were programming it, I would try to have, you're generally going to make the most progress with whatever you do first in the exercise. Now, if you're mixing and matching it like this with a kind of a slow circuit approach or however you want to call it, it doesn't matter quite as much. But if you start on Monday with like a pressing exercise, I would say on Wednesday, you might want to start with something else. So maybe you start with a lower body exercise that day,

like a squatting motion. And then on Friday, maybe you do like an upper body pulling exercise to start. You're making sure that you attack every movement when you're fresh throughout the week. You know, I'm just thinking that push-pull legs really work nicely for this. Even if we're talking about shorter workouts,

kind of doing in this different circuit style. But if that first workout, again, we have time for 68 sets. And let's just say it's six. That's what we have time for is six sets. And so you do six sets of... So because you could do your horizontal and your vertical pushing in that workout. And then you have six sets of pulling that starts with a hip hinge of some kind.

And then you have six sets for your lower body. Somebody who's new is going to do well with that. They're going to make good progress, not just a little bit. And somebody who's experienced is certainly going to maintain their physique with that. And they might lose a little bit of strength compared to their strongest doing twice or three times that volume, but they're going to maintain most of their performance with that. Yeah, definitely. And especially when you're looking at... That's probably how I would do it personally, just because I like to squat and deadlift in different workouts. I don't like doing them in the same workout because it's a lot on my lower back. Now, I don't have back problems, but it's just a lot. It's a lot on my lower back. It's a lot on my hips as well. And so I prefer to separate those things. And so push-pull legs just fits nicely into this approach.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good way of approaching it in terms of that goal of just trying to make sure you're attacking different motions when you're fresh too. So you're not always, you're not only kind of giving the choice part of your workout to chest training, for instance. That's like a common guy thing, right? Where you always start with some kind of pressing exercise. You know, if that's the muscle group you most want to develop, that's not a terrible thing to do either, if that's what you want to do. But especially if you have limited time, it doesn't really make sense. So yeah, I mean, push pull legs is a great way to start. And if you, you know, if you want to train six days a week, you could just double it up, right? So you do push pull legs, push pull legs. Now, if you want to do a slightly different cadence,

let's say you want to do push-pull legs, but you don't want to do, you want to train four days per week, you could do push-pull legs, push-pull legs, push. And then the next week would start with pull legs, push. You know, you can stagger it that way as well. Or that fourth day, you could always just use to prioritize, just to give a little bit more volume

to whatever you most want to develop. So with women, it's usually lower body. So they might want to go push legs, pull legs, something like that. And as far as those individual workouts, if we have six sets, then unless I'm missing something like the push workout, you could start with your horizontal or your vertical push. And then your next exercise is the other. Your final exercise could be an isolation exercise for say your triceps. In the pull, it could be a vertical pull, horizontal pull, and then you could do a little bit your two sets of biceps, which also for it's more of more for men than women in my experience. But but many women also do like to train arms. And that is one of the

body parts that they pay attention to, you know, most women I've worked with over the years, they pay the most attention to their lower body, and maybe the least attention to their pecs. But but many do also pay attention to how their shoulders look and maybe the least attention to their pecs. But many do also pay attention to how their shoulders look and how their arms look often because they're wearing clothing that reveal their shoulders and arms. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfectly valid way to program it as well. And that's where it just gets into personal preference of what you want to prioritize with the time you have. I also just to just one other thing is, and I've seen, sorry to keep jumping in, but I've just, I've seen some other versions

of this short workouts. You just do a few a week that are full body. So by full body, that means you're doing a little bit of upper body and lower body training in the same session. And depending on where you're at and what you're doing, that can also entail more warmup. So if you have to do a barbell bench press and a, let's say a barbell squat in the same workout, is that bad? No, of course not. You're going to spend a little bit more time warming up than if you're doing, let's say a push workout, you warm up on that first push exercise and you don't have to warm up. That's it. You only had to do one or two warmup sets and you're done

warming up for the workout. Same thing, of course, goes for a pull workout. Let's say you're starting with some sort of deadlifts, some sort of hip hinge. You are not going to have to warm up for your pull-ups that come next or your lat pull-down. And of course, when you get to your biceps, you're plenty warm there. And lower body, your one or two warm-up sets that you do on that first exercise are all you need for your entire workout. Yeah, that would be another good logistical argument for not doing full-body exercises. You're right. It's probably less... Maybe one reason people can get away with that, so to speak, is that in many cases, the exercises they're doing are not as

technical and not as challenging. So if you're doing a full body workout and it's mostly single joint exercises, if it's body weight stuff, yeah, or body weight, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't matter so much, but yeah, if you're doing what we're recommending, which is mostly using multi-joint compound exercises, pushing fairly close to failure, yeah, I mean, you probably are going to have to do more warm-up sets if you're doing a full-body workout, whereas with something... Even if you're new, right? I mean, I wouldn't tell somebody new to just, let's say they're going to do a deadlift and don't warm up, just go. You're not strong yet. Yeah, that would not be a smart move. And even, especially if you're new, the other argument for doing more warmups

would just be technique practice. You know, more reps practicing good technique. So yeah, I'm definitely not a fan of shirking that when you're starting out. So yeah, that would be another good argument for doing something more like a push-pull legs. And again, you can do all sorts of different combinations of these, right?

But you could do a traditional, you know, the example we just gave was more of like a hybrid push-pull legs, full body. You could do just a traditional push-pull legs as well, where you do three or four pushing exercises, do two or three sets of each, you know, pull, same thing, lower body, same thing, including the deadlift and the pull workout generally. And that's also a perfectly fine way to do it. I would also say when you're looking at using lower volumes in your training, the benefits of doing a higher frequency, I don't really see those for most people.

I would say if you're doing just like six sets throughout the week for a particular muscle group, you could probably... Trying to split that into multiple workouts, I don't see a significant benefit physiologically there or in terms of muscle growth or strength or anything like that. Cramming those all in one workout is probably entirely fine. So you could even say that's for, let's say you're an advanced trainee and you're just trying to maintain, you know, that would be actually a very good application there of like a push full legs program that might actually be a bit better than some alternatives you could do. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. And for, for people who are new, it's easy to understand and it's easy to execute. So that, that counts for something too.

And like you said, I don't know why those six sets, as opposed to doing your six sets for your pull muscles in one workout, splitting those into three workouts of two sets. There's no, there's no, there's no way that that increased frequency is going to matter in that application. And again, the main argument in favor of doing a higher frequency is reducing fatigue. So you're not doing six sets of one exercise, say squats, and then you go into six sets of leg press or something. Yeah, you're going to be toast. But in this case, the absolute amount of sets also matters quite a bit. I mean, that's the main thing that matters when you're talking about frequency. So if you're doing six total sets, you could do six total sets

in one workout for one muscle group and be fine. Maybe the last set or two is a little bit lower quality, but even then it's debatable. And if you're a beginner, it almost certainly doesn't matter. Now, one other scenario too that might be worth touching on is let's say whether you whether you're more of a beginner, say within your first year of training, or more of an advanced trainee in this scenario too, let's say you're traveling or something like that, and you hit a period where maybe you're not able to train as much as you would like for a period, but that's not going to be your norm forever, but a month or two, something like that. One interesting piece of research found that you could do just one set, for each muscle group, one heavy set and maintain most of your strength. Now, I didn't look at muscle gain, but again, when you look at, you know, you don't

really lose much of anything after six to eight weeks of doing nothing. I would be very surprised if you lost any muscle gain, muscle growth with this strategy, but you can maintain most of your strength with doing just one heavy set per muscle group per week. And I've personally found that to be the case. And it also makes sense theoretically when you look at strength as a skill, it's really a neuromuscular skill, just like hitting a golf ball with a club or swimming or anything like that. When it comes to maintaining your strength, it's mostly about just maintaining the technique. And the weight matters with technique. So it's not like you can just take an empty bar and do a set with that. You have to be using an appropriate weight or heavy weight. But you can essentially maintain your strength with even less volume than it takes to maintain

your muscle mass over time. And you can lose a tremendous amount of strength on an exercise by not doing it for a long period of time. I experienced that firsthand during COVID. it for a long period of time. I experienced that firsthand during COVID. For six to eight months, I was working out at home and I had dumbbells and bands and I didn't lose any muscle. The dumbbells went up to like 80, 85 pounds. They were adjustable. But whatever that maximum amount was, 80, 85, doing dumbbell front squats was actually pretty difficult. I don't know if I could do at the time more than sets of 10. That was close to failure. So that's a perfectly effective training stimulus. And I was doing probably 12 hard sets per week for my lower body. So I lost no muscle at all,

but I hadn't barbell squatted in six to eight months. By the time I finally wanted to get back in the gym, I could have gone back sooner, but I was just liking being able to go downstairs, do a workout, and just be done. As opposed to driving to the gym, seeing people, talking, which inevitably just happens. And I like it, but at the same time, it just takes more time. And so six to eight months go by. And I remember that squatting maybe 225, might even been a little bit less, 195 for like sets of six-ish. And it hurting. My quads were like wrecked.

It took a couple of months to get reacquainted with the exercise. Again, which is odd because I was doing dumbbell squats. I was doing lunges. It's not the same. Yeah, strength is very specific to the exercise and also to the rep range, which is a frustrating fact. But it's the case. And squats are also just their own beast as well. And I think anyone who's really gotten to a high level with squats will agree with that.

It seems like it's a harder exercise to progress on than most in many cases, just from a technique standpoint, at least versus deadlift, let's say that. Yeah, it's definitely more technical. Yeah. And riddle me this. So I was doing no hip hinging. Maybe I did a little bit of dumbbell deadlifting, but I remember trying it and it just, the dumbbells weren't heavy enough. Feels like a waste. Yeah. It was just like this kind of waste time. Thinking about it now, maybe I could have made a single leg with that weight, but regardless, I did basically no hip hinging for months and months and months. And my deadlift was down, but I remember telling you about it. I think my 1RM,

I calculated it based on my training. I'm back in the gym. I have my little whatever I did for sets of what. Calculate my 1RM. I think it was down 30 pounds only. 30 pounds. And I didn't deadlift once in six to eight months. I trained my lower body and my squat 1RM down, I don't know, like 80 pounds. Yeah, yeah.

And you were also a bit leaner too. So your strength to weight ratio probably for the deadlift was not all that different you were also a bit leaner too. So, you know, your strength to weight ratio probably, uh, for the deadlift was not all that different. That's a good point. Actually. Yeah. Yeah. I lost eight pounds over that and not muscle. I got like pretty, pretty lean without even really trying that hard. Yeah. If anything, you might've actually, when you calculate like your one around versus your body weight, you might've actually had an improvement on the deadlift. You should not train. That is the takeaway. That's the key. But yeah, deadlifts are, yeah, it's just different with squats and deadlifts too. It's very exercise specific about

what exercises degrade in terms of strength faster than others. Bench press seems like that's kind of all over the place. Depends on the individual. You know, I know most people find that tends to drop off more while cutting than some of the other exercises, too. Yeah. What else? What else does it cover on minimalist training programs? I mean, I think that that's everything that I had. I was going to ask you if there's anything still kind of just bouncing around in your head that anything I should have asked. I mean, I jotted down a few just guidelines

for people to keep in mind based on their goals. So that's really whenever we're talking about programming, that would be the first thing I would ask somebody is what are your goals? What's the point of doing it? So in the case of minimalist training programs, I would say, is your goal to try and do as little as you can while still making some progress? Is it goal to try and do as little as you can while still making

some progress? Is it just to maintain and then, you know, as a stopgap until you can start training the way you want to again in the future? You know, is it just to stay healthy? Are you trying to gain muscle or strength? And it really, the proper setup for all of this depends. You know, for all those goals, in many cases, one program will be fine for all of those as well. But there are a few guidelines people can use. So I would say, if you're just concerned about your strength, goals. In many cases, one program will be fine for all of those as well. But there are a few guidelines people can use. So I would say if you're just concerned about your strength, one heavy set per muscle group per week is probably fine for just maintaining it. For health, it's probably something like two to four sets per muscle group per week, which is really the main

example we've come back to several times when we're talking here. For muscle, it's probably about the same for a beginner. It's like two to four sets per muscle group per week. Now, for a beginner, that would be to gain, though, right? Not to maintain. They're going to gain muscle on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you're a brand new beginner, I mean, you've never lifted weights before. It's been years since you touched a weight.

I mean, one set per week and you'll be able to gain muscle. But yeah, so that's true. Yeah, if you're talking about a beginner, even two, one set per week and you'll be able to gain muscle. But yeah, so that's true. Yeah, if you're talking about a beginner, even two to four sets per week, you'll actually make some progress. And then that six sets per week that we laid out, a simple push-pull legs, a beginner will do quite well with that. They could probably do a little bit better if they did a little bit more, but that's going to produce more than probably 50% of the total muscle strength gain available to them, at least for the first several months, maybe even six months, maybe longer. Yeah. So actually I have here in my notes, there was this review that Brad Schoenfeld and some of his colleagues did at Lehman College where they looked at 15 different studies and they tried to

essentially quantify this minimum effective dose and where the diminishing, the point of diminishing returns occurred when it comes to sets per week for muscle group. And you always have to take this with a grain of salt. You can't look at these numbers as absolutes, but the conclusions were interesting. So what they found was one to four weekly sets per major muscle group per week

got you about 64% of the available gains in muscle mass. Now, this is for people who are new. That's always a safe bet with research. Yeah, almost always. In general, it's very rare to find studies on people who are even moderately well-trained. In studies, you see this often where they'll say advanced trainees and they're squatting maybe a bit above their body weight, something like that, where it's almost like early intermediate, late beginner stage. Yeah, it's not to put these people down.

It's just the reality. They're often recruiting college kids who've, in many cases, just got into weightlifting. They're not usually looking at somebody who's been properly training and eating for a decade. But yeah, I would assume this is almost certainly untrained

or very lightly trained people. So yeah, one to four weekly sets for major muscle group, 64% of your maximum gains or hypothetical maximum gains. And then five to nine weekly sets per major muscle group was about 84%. So if you're looking at the 80-20 on this, five to nine weekly sets per muscle group per week is a good target to shoot for. So let's say you're still making half the progress you would if you were training optimally, so to speak, for muscle gain. Yeah, two to four sets per week is probably fine for that. You're definitely gonna make progress on that. But if you're a more advanced trainee,

you probably are looking at maybe more of a minimum of like five to 10, something like that to at least make progress. Now, if you're just looking at maintaining, you know, three, two, four, somewhere around there is still probably fine. Yeah. I mean, even two workouts, you think of, okay, if one workout, you started with a squat and you did two sets of that. And then you did maybe a bench press. You did two sets of that. That's one workout. And then the other workout, you started with, maybe you'd start with a deadlift and do two sets of that. And then follow that up with two sets of... You probably would do some pulling, right? Just two sets of a pull and that's it. You do two workouts per week. Those are basically full body workouts.

That would be enough to produce significant results in somebody who's new and probably to maintain the physique and a lot of the performance of somebody who's experienced. Yeah, I would completely agree with that. And you could change up, like you could have week A that and then week B, instead of the bench press, you do an overhead press after the squat. And so you can make some simple changes. But again, you're only talking about 15 minute workouts per week. Yeah. And you know, another funny thing too, that I think more advanced weightlifters will find sometimes when say they're forced to train less than they would normally like to is they often

perform better initially, just because in many cases, they were just doing too much. And they're always in a state of somewhat fatigued. you know, they're always going into workouts, a little bit sub optimally rested. You know, let's say you have, you know, work constraints or something like that, that, or maybe you're traveling, and you're not able to train as much. Often, they come back, and they're essentially, they were forced to taper without really knowing what was going on. And they are, oh, wow, I feel it's so weird. I'm coming back and I feel so good. In many cases, that actually makes perfect sense. So the takeaway there is just don't discount lower volume training too. I mean, I've experienced some of this as well. And I know you did as well, actually, with cutting. I remember during COVID,

especially like where you, you know, as you said, you were doing a bit less training overall than you were normally. And less, I think, I think less intensity was a big thing too. My total volume went down a little bit, probably not too much. But now I wasn't doing any deadlifting. I wasn't doing barbell, like real difficult squatting. The most difficult squatting I was doing was a dumbbell front squat sets of 10. That's just not the same. And doing some lunges.

Yeah, the stuff that beats you up. Yeah, exactly. A lot less stress on the body in that sense. Yeah, it almost served as kind of a recuperative period while still holding on to what you had. And I've experienced that as well where last year I was doing a lot more jujitsu and I cut back on my strength training. And on the one hand, I do enjoy lifting weights. So, you know, I don't like cutting back too much there, but it was kind of nice just going into workouts and keeping it short and getting in, getting out and feeling pretty rested every time I would be in there. So even if you have the means to train a lot,

there's nothing wrong with taking a bit of time to try a lower volume training plan. And also, this is just a general principle with anything is setting limitations and then working within that also forces you to be a bit more resourceful and think a little more strategically about whether or not you need to do this exercise. Is that really helping me get toward whatever my goal is or not? In many cases, as you're saying, with people you see in the gym, a lot of what they do is they're not really sure why they're doing it. If they're putting together their program and they're, all right, I want to do this exercise and this exercise. And I saw this YouTuber do it. So I should do that too.

And the reasons for including exercises or a certain volume in their program, they haven't really thought that out. So embracing a little bit of a constraint on how much you can train can actually improve the quality of your training quite a bit as well. improve the quality of your training quite a bit as well. If we were to bring it down to one workout, just for people who might want to consider that, or maybe that is the best they can do, I suppose what you could do is you could start with a difficult lower body. So you could start with a squat, and then you could do a push and then do a pull, not a deadlift. Off the top of my head, this is how I do it. So let's say start with some sort of squat.

Then maybe it's a, so let's say barbell back squat. Then I go over and do a bench press and then I just do some sort of pull. It might be a lat pull down. Dumbbell rows or yeah, something like that. Yeah, it might be a dumbbell row. It might be a barbell row. I probably wouldn't do that.

I don't like barbell rowing after deadlifting because I find it's a bit much on my back. Squats do it. Yeah, it kind of beats you up. Yeah. Depends. A front squat would probably be okay because it's not tough on the back.

But so that's it. That's your full body workout. You started with a lower body and then you did a push exercise and you did a pull exercise. And then the next week, instead of the squat, I would probably deadlift. So I would do my two sets of deadlift and i would do the other push that i did not do so let's say i did the

bench press the week before i would do the overhead press now and then i would do if i did a let's say a lat pull down a vertical pull i now would do the horizontal pull and just flip back and forth uh week a week a week b week b yep just rotate I mean, it's a good way of doing it. And there's a reason that, you know, starting strength, same idea, right? You have to work at A, work at B. That formula works very well.

So, yeah, there's a lot of different ways to do it, for sure. All right, well, I think that's it now, right? I think we've covered... Yeah, I mean, I think we've beat it to death pretty well. Yeah, I mean, I would say the main takeaway is just know why you're doing it.

Like there's nothing that you have a goal going into it of what you want to get out of it. And that's going to dictate what kind of minimalist training program you take on. If somebody has been, and I'll speak to myself here, if somebody has been doing higher frequency, high volume training for some time, it might be interesting to them to try a little bit less training. I've reduced my volume. So I cut back on the number of sets. That's what I did first. So instead of doing four sets per exercise in my workouts, I cut back to three because I also wanted to cut. I just wanted to see how my body felt in a calorie deficit with a bit less volume than I was doing previously. And I noticed sleeping better. I noticed just seemed to be recovered a little bit better just by that slight reduction, even in a calorie deficit.

And then also, actually today, I was like, I'm going to go to four days per week. I really don't need that fifth day if I'm just trying to maintain. I enjoy training, but I have a lot of other things that I want to do with my time and that I need to do with my time. And I'm thinking, I'm going to drop to four days. And it is basically push-pull legs with a little bit of additional upper body work. It's probably going to be like a shoulders and arms day is probably what it's going to be. And I think that makes sense for me. And I haven't cut back on volume in a long time, over a year at least, because once I got back in the gym, I was back to a higher volume five days a week program. And I haven't done four days a week consistently. Sometimes it would just happen because it happens. And I haven't done four days a week consistently. Sometimes it would just

happen because it happens. But I haven't decided to do a four day a week program in a very long time. Yeah. As long as I've known you, you've always done five days a week. I don't know. Years and years and years. I know I could go down to two or three days per week and still maintain. I still like doing what I'm doing. And if I'm not doing that, I do want to be active. And so I could hop on my bike back here. That's fine. But I do enjoy strength training a little bit more than riding the bike. And also, over time... Maybe this is another point worth highlighting too is just over time, you are going to make better progress with a higher volume. I think that is to a certain significant progress at this point. I've had to accept that I have to be consistently in a calorie surplus, or I just can't train hard enough to really move

the needle. And, and I see that in terms of tracking like one RM is tracking every workout. I mean, you know, we do the same thing. But I'm not, when I say for people listening that I can't make progress unless I do that, like I am measuring things. It's not just, do I feel like I'm making progress? Do I look bigger? Like, no, it's tracking everything and seeing that to make, to make slow and steady progress in my whole body strength, which is the only way I'm going to gain any more muscle, that's what it takes. I can't stay fairly lean and do that because on the dietary side of things, for anybody who has stayed fairly lean for a while, you know that you are going to under-eat more often than over-eat. That's what it takes. If it's the other way around, you get fatter. So inevitably, what happens is you tend to be in a calorie deficit more often than a calorie surplus.

And then occasionally, you make up for what would be net fat loss by just going to a restaurant, eating a bunch of food, or you just eat a bit more for a few days because you're feeling a bit hungry or whatever. And so over time, your body composition kind of just fluctuates in the same range. Yeah. And that makes sense. You are at that point where every little detail matters in terms of optimizing body composition. So you're on the opposite end of the spectrum from a beginner. You could be in a significant calorie deficit and still gain a fair amount of muscle mass when you're new. In your case, you're very close to your absolute genetic potential. It's much harder to make any kind of progress unless you're in a surplus.

And of course, that's what bodybuilders have done forever, right? Even the ones on drugs, they still have to do a similar process, even if they're staying much leaner throughout that process. But yeah, and also too, maybe if you are a more advanced weightlifter and the idea of going down to two to four sets per week scares you a bit. I think that one third rule is a good one to operate based on. So operate off of. So if you're doing, say, 12 sets per week, well, that's going to give you the same number.

Let's say you're doing like 18 sets per week. 15 or 18. Yeah. Yeah. 15 sets or something like that. Just go down to five and see how you fare. And you can probably maintain for quite a long time doing that. I mean, I can think of some people in the fitness space who it's kind of their shtick and they make some dubious

claims about the supposed benefits of training just two to three times per week. Like, oh, if you train five times a week, you're going to fry your nervous system, said someone who's full of shit. But there are people, I don't want to name names, but there are people who they maintain a great physique training on average, probably once or twice a week. Because I'm thinking of a few people who they will go sometimes one, two weeks without training at all. And then they'll do two workouts. Then they'll do two workouts the following week. Then they'll do one the following week. Then they'll skip the following week. Then there's the two. It's not even necessarily consistently two. And you wouldn't really know it. Looking at them, they always look the same and they look good. And you can't just immediately point to drugs, like maybe in a couple of cases,

but it doesn't appear. It's not blatantly obvious, put it that way. Yeah, that's the nice thing about muscle gain is once you've got it, it's actually pretty hard to lose it unless you make some pretty significant missteps with your diet and sleep especially. It seems like those are two of the main areas where as long as you're doing something in the gym and you're still staying pretty active,

and this is often the case with guys who are really into bodyweight training who often build a pretty impressive physique. And then it seems like they just do gymnastic stuff. People get a little bit misled by that, I think, at times as well, right? Where they do traditional bodybuilding training for like 10 years. And then this YouTuber starts doing calisthenics training. And they are recommending that to get the body. It's like, all right, dude, a little bit misleading, but whatever. But yeah, the bottom line is once you've built a pretty impressive physique, uh, it doesn't take that

much effort to maintain. And by impressive, it just means, you know, for a guy like 20, 30 pounds of muscle, relatively lean, like you're bigger than most people and you're somewhere close to your genetic potential. Yeah. You don't have to do that much to maintain it and still look pretty good. Great. Well, um, I think that's everything, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Cool. Well, thanks again for taking the time. And I know it's late over there. So I appreciate and good information. And for people who want to learn more from you, I mean, I guess a good place to head over is to Legion's website, right?

Yeah, just go to the Legion blog. So that's what I spend most of my time on each week is working on the articles that go up there. And I don't know if we've done an article specifically on minimalist training programs yet. No, I don't think so. I know that's on our publication calendar. So that will be going up at some point in the near future. Yeah, a lot of information on training in general. some point in the near future. But yeah, a lot of information on training in general. So, you know, a lot of the topics we touched on, volume, frequency, intensity, you know, deloading,

tapering, stuff like that is on the website. If people want to look at more of that, rest periods too. Yep. Yeah, exactly. And that's legionathletics.com slash blog. And you'll see there are articles from me, there are articles from John, there are articles from Barney who works with us as well. And I think that's primarily, it's just the three of us, right? And there are some guest posts, I guess, you can find if you go far back enough. A lot of good information over on the blog from all of us. I think, how many articles do we have now?

Do you know the number? It's thousands, right? It's got to be at least a thousand. It might be. Yeah, actually, it might be at this point. Yeah, if it's not, it's darn close to it. It's definitely over. It's between 500 and a thousand, I would say. And we have some, a lot of those are long articles too. I think the longest article we have is. It's probably one to two million total words. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's something like 25,000 words. It's basically like a small book, one of them. Most of them are not like that. That was that one mega one we did.

That would be a good one if people are interested. You can, you know, it's the 12 best strength training programs. If you just Google that Legion Athletics, you'll find it. But yeah, we have a lot of content, especially on training that people can go through. And then there's always new stuff going up. Always a couple of new articles every week. So if somebody is still listening, then they're into this stuff and they're going to like the blog. So they should go. They should go check it out. Yeah, check it out.

Cool, man. Well, thanks again. I look forward to the next one. Well, my friend, that is it for today's episode. I hope you liked it. Thank you for listening. And don't forget to enter my podcast giveaway in case you missed it because you skipped the intro. I understand. I normally skip intros too. I am giving away over $1,000 in prizes to commemorate my 1,000th episode of Muscle for Life. And to enter to win, you just have to head over to muscleforlife.show slash giveaway. Muscle for life.show slash giveaway.

And it takes just a couple of minutes to enter. And you're going to get some free bonus goodies for entering. So you will get a chance to win over $1,000 in prizes. Plus, you'll get instant access to some pretty cool stuff that I think you're going to like, including workouts and meal plans and a special coupon code, a special discount for my sports nutrition company, Legion.