How to maximise muscle gain in 40 minutes a week

I’m going to show you right now how you can maximise muscle gain in 40 minutes a week. Understand this and you’ll never see the gym or strength training and fitness in the same way. I’m sorry if this disenfranchises you to the traditional world of strength training fitness, but I feel like this is something that many more people need to understand. The way to understand muscle growth stimulation, strength training, what we’re trying to accomplish when we go to the gym is by understanding intensity. Relative intensity. The basic driver of muscle growth is mechanical tension. So that just refers to in plain speak, getting your muscles to the point where they are working at their absolute limit, their strength capacity, and you’re pushing them to basically be stronger than they are. They’re doing everything they can to move as much force as possible and they fail and then that’s the work that signals your body.
Look, we’re using all the strength we’ve got. It’s not enough to meet the demands we’re putting on it, and so we need to do something about that to get better at being strong and what that looks like in terms of human body adaptation is building muscle tissue. So on a fundamental level, that’s the simplest strength training is it’s like trying to get to that level of maximum intensity and by using it signal, strength aid and therefore muscle gain. Now the way that traditional strength training, most of what we’re talking about when you talk about fitness and you talk about strength training research and you talk about how long it takes to get muscle gain, stimulated in a week approaches it like this. Let’s say you’re doing a working set of an exercise, and so let’s say that this is the duration of your set. When you think about how difficult the work you’re doing is relative to your maximum capacity, most of the set is far below that.
The large majority of the set is almost not even heavy or difficult. If you’re doing a set of 10 reps, maybe eight of these are pretty bloody easy, this isn’t work we’re interested in, we might then get to the last two or three reps and start to actually feel something. And so maybe on a small portion of those reps, so maybe actually somewhere closer to here, we start to then feel the strain, the difficulty, we reach that point where it actually takes an effort to move the bar or our body depending on what movement we’re doing. And so maybe this starts to get into this kind of mid tier zone of somewhat intense for the majority of sets, the majority of training that you’re doing this is assuming that you’re doing good training that’s heavy and that actually pushes yourself to failure, which let’s bear in mind a lot of people don’t even reach that point.
If we get to failure and we train at our maximum strength limit, how much of the set is at that point where you’re failing and the bar is only just moving you reach that point where it takes every single little bit of your strength to move. It’s not very much. And so maybe for a tiny portion of some of the reps, so some of the range of motion of some of the reps that we do do, we reach this kind of red zone of maximum intensity, that portion of our entire set, that portion is what’s actually stimulating your body to grow, but it’s taken us all of these reps and then all of all the parts of the range of motion, that’s not maximum intensity. Taking us all of that just to get this tiny bit, this little droplet of stimulation. And so now let’s say that’s a set.
Then what do we do after that? We go and rest and we take time off after that to go and build up and get ready for the next set and then we do it again and then we do it again and then we do it again. And so what we end up with is a lot of work, a long gym session with lots and lots of sets, lots and lots of reps, lots and lots of work that sub maximal in order to accumulate this percentage, this portion of the work that is actually stimulating our bodies to grow. It’s reasonably inefficient. Let’s say this is a normal workout of 60 minutes and let’s say that we get a few seconds towards the end of each set where we’re actually reaching failure, maximum intensity. If we were doing 20 sets, each of these are set, let’s say we did 20 of them and we accumulated in each of those sets three seconds of true maximum intensity work at failure, struggling to move the bar or failing on the way down and we need a spot to help us get back up.
If we got three seconds per set and we did a big workout of 20 sets, then that is one total accumulated minute across a 60 minute workout of maximum intensity work that is less than 2% of our workout spent maximally stimulating muscle growth. What if we were able to get rid of all of this work and just do the work that stimulates the growth? What if we threw out the junk and just did this and only this and then went home? If we did that, I can tell you it would only take us less than 20 minutes of work per week to just about max out our body’s muscle growth capacity to stimulate all the growth that we could for the week, and that’s 20 minutes working time over a whole week, not in a single session. We could also in doing this, take this mid effort work that’s sort of stimulating sort of not as good as it could be and just channel that energy all into this maximum intensity work.
So we cut the waste, we cut the filler work, we just not do it, and then channel all the resources that were splinted across the semi heavy work into just the really heavy work. Not only do we achieve more efficient maximum intensity work, but we can actually pour more resources into it and get more out of it. Think about your last session in the gym. How much of it did you actually spend going as hard as possible needing to put all of your energy into moving, continuing to push through the range of motion. How much of the time did you spend not being sure if you could even keep going because you’re actually finding a limit of your strength? It probably wasn’t much. And what do you think would happen if you just removed everything else? Took those isolated bits of struggle straining work and just did a few minutes of that because if you felt like you’re spinning your wheels a lot of the time you’re in the gym, you’ve already intuitively clued into the inefficiency in this approach, in this fixed resistance traditional strength training approach.
And it’s not to say that this doesn’t work, but would you rather do all this to get a result or do just this and get an even better result? I’ve been lucky enough to try both, and I can tell you I won’t go back to the former anytime soon because to me there is no advantage to doing that. The way you can think about this is the use of our maximum strength. The maximum intensity training is like at target. We know if we hit that then we’re going to stimulate muscle growth. We hit a certain amount of it each week and we maximise that growth for the week. Traditional training using fixed resistance weights or body weight movements or gym machines, whatever it is, resistance that doesn’t change doesn’t adapt to our body that is spraying at the target with an automatic raffle without even being sure of what you’re aiming for yet, you’re going to hit it a few times.
You’re going to get a few bullets that find their target, but you are using a huge amount of ammunition in terms of your resources, your time, your energy on missing and doing absolutely nothing productive. And so what we could do instead, hypothetically, if we could only do that maximum intensity work, if we could make sure that we always trained at the limit of our strength and we just did that and we just did that 20 minutes of potent work a week, that is like getting a sniper rifle lining up the target and taking one shot and obliterating the thing that we’re aiming for. If it’s the same target, the same outcome, which would you rather do? So this is the theory. How do you actually achieve constant maximum intensity strength training? All we need is a way of adjusting the difficulty of the movements we do when we do our strength training so that we start at the limit of our strength, we start at that point of failure and then can keep it there the whole time we train.
And that basically just looks like adjusting the difficulty based on the feedback of our body to keep the movement slow throughout the positive so that we’re always trying our hardest to move up. We’re getting stuck along the way and we’re just adjusting back just enough to allow ourselves to keep going. And then it looks like dialling the difficulty up so hard that on the negatives we don’t even lower, we’re actually forced down despite resisting, and so we get to work other side of our strength limit just below it on the way up and actually above it on the way down. And that is surprisingly easy to do when we use body weight training because the difficulty of our movements, the intensity in body weight training comes not from a certain load being placed on a barbell or a machine, but just from the position we put our body in.
And because we can change that position whilst we train body weight training, it means if we know what we’re doing and we know what to adjust, we can scale all the movements we do all the way up from elite end goal, super high strength level difficulty all the way down to something that my mom in her sixties can happily do. Someone who’s overweight, sedentary can easily start with and scale up as they get better. So obviously this brings up the question, if we can cut out all the waste, only do the maximally effective work, that’s only taking us 20 minutes of work a week, 40 minutes a week if we add in rest and set up time and everything, 40 minutes a week spec training. Most people I talk to think that sounds old very well and good jack, but 40 minutes a week is pretty easy.
What if we did more? Well, I would like to say you could go and do double this and get double the results, but unfortunately that is not how the human body works. The reason I quote this 20 minute a week number when I talk about effective working time is that we have tested this a lot and when training the six basic movements that we use in our system doing each of those once a week after around the two or three minute of training mark per each of those movements, we start to see diminishing returns. We start to see training become less fun. It switches from being an actively enjoyable thing to suddenly grind emotionally aversive. We start to see lower output of intensity during those sets. So the actual quality, the potency of that training is forced to lower. It’s just not sustainable past that point.
And so everything reduces in quality. We see rate of discomfort and injury and under recovery start to increase and we see no discernible increase in progress, no extra gains past that point of effort. The way that we determine how much to do is simply by listening to our bodies. You clue into how much your body can do actually working at the limit of its strength. And once you can’t put in a hundred percent effort, once you can’t train as heavy as possible anymore, it’s a pretty good indicator that you have found that limit past which your body just can’t sustain this max effort training and that is the productive point at which to stop. You can try and do more work, but all that happens is you dilute the intensity and therefore quality of your training, you don’t recover as well. You’re more prone to injury and because it’s harder and more emotionally aver, you become less likely to do it and you don’t even sustain it.
So for no increase in progress, it’s a huge amount of downside. Think of this like trying to sprint as fast as possible, which is really what we’re trying to do when we’re trained. It’s literally work our body at the absolute capacity, the threshold of its potential force output. If you try and sprint as fast as possible, you can do that for a certain amount of time and you can do it productively for a certain amount of time, but once you get past a hundred metres, 200 metres, whatever it is, it’s just not possible to keep that up and you’ll start to slow down. And if you take that on from the start, you notice the whole distance is slower and you notice it’s harder and it’s just not the same as if you tried to go all out as fast as possible for as little distance as you wanted to.
And so that’s the way we want to approach maximum intensity strength training. It’s as little as you want to do. You literally get to stop whenever you want and the only goal is to go as heavy as you possibly can for that period of time that you are training. Okay, hear you saying this all sounds well and good, but there are such positives to gym exercises to training more, but doing it with simple fixed resistance movements. For instance, how do we track our progress with a barber? I can measure my reps and my sets and I can track over time to make sure I’m doing more. If I lose that, then I’m going to have no idea if I’m improving with this method. We’re measuring gains every single time we train because you start with the limit of your strength. Then all you have to do is measure where you’re starting, at what point you begin to fail when you start your first rep of an exercise and you’ll see week to week that you are improving because all we care about is our maximum.
If our maximum increases over time, which is measured on our first rep, then we know we’re getting stronger. We know we’re building muscle and we know our training’s doing everything it needs to do, even if it’s only taking us half an hour a week to get done, it’s objective progress. Another thing that pops up is people saying they like training. And what will I do when I throw these four hours a week in the gym and suddenly I only have to train for 40 minutes? Well, at this point I’d say open your eyes and get a life. There’s infinite exercise you can do that’s not strength training. That’s far more fun and interesting than just slogging it out in a gym. I’d be honest with yourself here, you’re strength trained for a result. You’re doing it to elicit a response from your body. Once that signal is sent, you can do whatever you want for the rest of the week.
You might as well go and find some things you enjoy doing to fill that time. This can be cardio, it can be sport, it can be non-exercise things. The time is yours. I would go and find ways to fill it that aren’t strength training. It’s probably going to enrich your life. Another concern a lot of people have is thinking that this sort of training it constant maximum intensity is going to be super intense and brutal and difficult. Remember, it’s exactly the same. The training we were doing before, if it was effective, if it was training that was actually working involved, pushing your strength limit, it involved failing, working at maximum intensity. It’s just that we had all this as well. And so it’s not like we’re adding in a bunch of this from nowhere. We’re just condensing training down to be just this. And remember, you’re stopping as soon as it’s not fun.
So this is only difficult, again, if you try and take on too much and you try and push your body past it’s comfortable limits of recovery. We’re literally listening to the signal that says this isn’t fun. And using that as a guide to know when to stop. And finally, if you’re worried that you’re going to miss out on something by not doing all that minimally effective, low intensity filler work, please do not worry. Not only does that work not stimulate muscle growth, but it also still has a damaging effect on your joints and connective tissue. It’s the most sinister of all because while not stimulating our muscles to grow and our body to develop in the way we want, it still taxes us and it still can lead to things like tendonitis, joint pain and injuries. And so by just doing the work that maximally stimulates strength gain and cutting out all the fluff junk volume, we give our bodies the best chance at recovering our joints and tendon whilst also maximising stimulation of muscle gain, strength gain, which is the best possible thing you can do for your health and longevity long term. So let’s say you can maximise muscle gain in 40 minutes a week. If you want to learn more about how you can actually start doing this, watch this video and I’ll chat to you in the next one.