How to hack fitness and build the body of your dreams in 40min a week

• The key to efficient training for building strength, muscle mass, and a lean body is to focus on reaching your maximum strength threshold in each basic movement pattern, rather than doing high-volume training.

• This involves finding the “sticking point” in each movement where you can’t go any further, and then working up to that point by scaling the difficulty up and down.

• The training only needs to be done for 12-18 minutes per week, divided into 2-3 short sessions of 2-3 minutes per exercise. 

• The key is to train at constant failure on each rep and movement, but not to overdo the volume or intensity beyond what your body can recover from each week.

• This highly efficient training method can lead to rapid progress in strength, muscle, and physique improvements when done consistently over time. [15:55]

If training for more than 40 minutes a week was going to get me better results, I would train for more than 40 minutes a week. The fact is, once you take the most effective routine and remove all the unnecessary waste from it, the work that you’re left with barely reaches 20 minutes total and done back to back in a single session, which is the least efficient way to do it will struggle to consume more than 40 minutes of your week. And I know this because I’ve trained this way for over five years and seen it work over and over again with dozens of different students across all different ages and starting abilities. Okay, so what does that training actually look like? What is the tiny fraction of your exercise routine if that even exists currently that’s driving the changes you want see in your body?
And most importantly, how can you right now go and find an isolator and use only it yourself even if you have no idea what you’re doing, zero proper training experience. That is what I want to show you right now. In this video, we’re going to identify that tiny proportion of work that actually matters in driving strength gain, increased muscle mass, and a leaner body composition. And as we go, I’m going to run you through live demos of all six of the basic planes of motion so that you can actually see what this looks like for yourself. Try it out and experience firsthand what it feels like to train with maximal efficiency so you can start eliminating all the waste from your training and progress towards your dream body rapidly in under 40 minutes a week with a few simple pieces of home equipment. If you’re new to this concept.
Really quick recap. Our goal in building a world-class body really fast and efficiently is increasing our maximum strength on the basic six planes of motion. We get that strength to a hard enough level. Then the byproduct is ample muscle mass comes really easy to maintain lean body composition, and we have obviously the strength and mobility to continue using our bodies at a really high level, however we choose to in daily life. If you want to exercise for fun or endurance or cardio or general wellbeing, you can do that after. Our first priority for a strong, really good looking body is to achieve these strength goals only needs to take 40 minutes a week and then you can go do whatever you like with that body outside of that. So basic model to understand for strength gain is that you have a certain maximum level of strength.
Say this black line, that’s the maximum amount of force you can exert and give a movement pattern. If we want to tell our bodies that they need to physically grow muscle tissue and get stronger, we need to challenge this maximum strength, which means doing training that reaches this threshold or very close to it. I made a video recently on force negatives, which explains the easiest way to find this threshold, which is going beyond it. It’s forcing your way down despite your best efforts to stay up because then we know that we’ve actually exceeded this threshold, which is extremely potent stimulus for that growth. If you haven’t watched that video already, check it out. It’s a nice explainer of this concept. But what about on the way up? What about the rest of the time when you’re training? What does it look like to actually reach this threshold and do work that’s maximally effective?
I’m going to show you in a second how to do this and what it looks like specifically, but understand the concept first. If we’re doing work that’s above our strength threshold, that forces us down and anywhere below is easy and allows us to lift. What happens as we approach this threshold is as we get closer and closer, it becomes harder and harder to lift. Our lifting pace slows down, and as we actually reach this threshold, what do you think happens When we match it? We get stuck at the point where the strength required of us for a movement matches our maximum possible level of strength. That’s the moment when we get stuck. That’s the moment when we find the sticking point in a movement, that point of failure where we actually can’t go any further no matter how hard we try. And the inefficient thing about most strength training is that less than 2% of most people’s training ever reaches this point.
Think about how often when you’re training in the gym or doing body weight training, you actually get stuck and can’t move. Usually it’s the end of your set, maybe the end of a later set. When you actually push to failure, you might spend a couple of seconds pushing hard. Those few seconds, even if it’s every single set across a whole workout ends up being a very small percentage of the total time you’re putting in. And so if we’re smart about how we approach things and how we set up our training, we can get that 2% of time spent at sticking point up to much closer to a hundred percent, and that is the secret to not only achieving elite results but to doing it in very little time. You can visualise this right now with a Nordic curl, really simple movement. We’re just flexing at the knee through 90 degrees of range of motion without body weight adding load.
Now if you try this, you’ll notice very quickly that it’s very difficult and you should fail right from the start. If you don’t give yourself any help and just try and do a Nordic, that’s your sticking point. There you go. You found it. You found a hundred percent difficulty. So what we can do here is then add some assistance from our hands. We can help ourselves up just an inch and then we can try again. We can try and lift the next bit without any extra help, just pulling with our hamstrings, trying to flex our knee and get ourselves up and we can fail for another second. Then we can assist ourselves another each and then try again. And by doing this, we’re essentially stacking that work that would only pop up for a second and two at the end of the set. We can do it from the start and we can stack it one after the other after the other all the way up.
Getting stuck is the one lever that you can get your hands on and focus on pulling that you actually know is going to drive the results that you want because once you’ve found the sticking point, you’ve found the exact point in training that is the gap. It’s just beyond the reach of what you can currently do and you can actually put all your focus into trying to do it. There’s not until you actually get stuck that you’re able to put this effort in. And so if you find it sooner, it means you can put your effort into the right place. The place is going to get results right from the outset. Let’s take a good example of this. The row, if you try and do a front lever right now, you’re going to find that you quickly flow and can’t do it because it’s extremely difficult.
It requires a lot of back strength. People think this is a core exercise, but living factor once you build a bit of strength is all lats. It’s your ability to row with your back. But the problem is most people just wrap out rows like this and they’re so easy. There’s no way to bridge the gap, right? Where do you put your effort? You put it into the sticking point. So what you can do with rows, the variable that makes front lever so difficult is that you have to keep pushing your hands way further and further towards your feet to be able to balance your body off the ground and the further you push your hands away towards your feet, the more leverage there is, the more force is required that the shoulder to do the rowing motion. And so if you just get into a row and before you start rowing, you just push your hands, you push the rings towards your feet, you’ll get to a certain point where now you try and row your elbows down towards the ground, it’s physically impossible and that’s perfect.
Now we found the sticking point and we can work against it for a second, then we can back off just enough so that we can get it up an inch and then we go again. We push away, we find the sticking point, we work against it and we just keep doing that all the way up to the top of the row and now you’ve got your hands on the lever. You can work to pull as hard as possible against maximal resistance. It doesn’t let you get anywhere every time you show up and train. There you go two, three minutes of that once a week and you do that for long enough. You’ll keep progressing how far you push those rings away until your feet are coming off the ground and then your feet are extending out and suddenly now you’re doing front levers. It might take a couple of years, but if you can progress a little bit further each week by yanking hard against this sticking point, you will get there eventually.
I remember before discovering this technique being really frustrated that I was never really able to push my prs. I felt like I spent a lot of my time building up to the hard work, and then as soon as I really got a chance to push my true strength limit, then I had to stop. The set was over. I got to do pull-ups and they were all sub maximal, and as soon as I got to the point where I couldn’t do a pull-up, then I had to end my set. Then eventually we flipped the script and started training the set starting at failure. So we would reach that point immediately and then instead of stopping, we’d scale down to keep going, spending one whole set just doing that. That is when this stuff got really crazy and results started flooding in really consistently. So what we did for chins was rather than ing out chins, we’d just start by trying to do one on chin up and just like with that Nordic example, it’s impossible.
It’s end goal. You start there, you can’t get anywhere, which is perfect because scaling down is so easy. You just use your feet, you help yourself get up a little bit and then you try again. You try and get the next inch without any help and then you go again and again and again. You can work all the way up to the top of the chin up doing this again, two, three minutes, a couple reps each side and I’m cooked. And that is how I built a full one arm chin up from a very beginner intermediate level. Again, it might take years to get to the end goal, but if you can see yourself progressing week by week using a little less help, suddenly able to do full range chin ups, suddenly able to do muscle up, you see all the bar products. If you’re pulling strength increasing from two or three minutes a week work, you don’t want to stop again.
People think it’s ridiculous. We can get these results in 40 minutes a week. Well, you look at that set this training’s like doing 10 sets in a single rep because every inch we’re getting stuck for a second or two fully at failure. As soon as my students try this themselves, none of them question the validity of this concept because you feel it. You realise that most of what you’ve been doing before has just not been effective training. May as well be sitting on the couch. Okay, so I’ll show you how this and what this looks like in action in the other movements, but first we need to make sure you avoid the key mistake that stops most people ever being able to benefit from this method before they even start trying. I had a client recently come in who was a bit older and less confident in his own ability to do these sorts of movements.
He looked at their end goals and thought that looks really difficult. I dunno if I’m up for this. And in his first week he thought he was literally too weak to do this training, but it was precisely because he was training. Well, what happened is he got to the sticking point on his handstand pushup and found it really early and lent into it, tried really hard to push through it and he then gave up and stopped the movement and thought, I’m too weak. And I had to tell him, no, look, you’ve done so well starting this set extremely effectively. All we need to do then is back off enough to allow you to keep doing the rep and keep getting stuck progressively, but not forever. Once you’re stuck for a second or two, we then just want to make it easy enough that you can get up the next inch and then you can make that harder enough to get stuck again.
But you need to realise that as soon as you have started training and you’re stuck, you’re going to need by definition to back off the difficulty after a second to allay. So you have to keep training. So on the handstand pushup, what that looks like is at the bottom here. The variable for this one is just how much load we put on our hands and when that’s too hard, we can take a load off onto our feet. And so my student was getting to this point, which is the hardest point, getting stuck. What we can then do here is just bring in a foot below our hands, and even me able to do freestanding hands and pushups. I do a few reps of this, I’m gassed, my shoulders are tired, I’m doing this sort of progression. So it’s really important that you know how to make things easier.
Take the weight off your hands, push through, and then you can scale up. If it gets easy, then you can put your feet back where they were load weight back on the hands. You can step your feet back up. If it gets even easier, you can flick your feet back up into the air. With this movement, we just keep our hips up and by just adjusting where we put our feet, we change how much weight’s on our hands to keep getting stuck the whole way through. Okay? So getting stuck is good. You aiming for it right from the start of your set and you’re backing off to make sure that you actually do get through these sets and don’t get stuck for too long in any single position. There’s another huge pitfall I want to warn you against that makes applying this difficult, dangerous, far less effective and generally just a horrible experience.
I had another client who was a bit dissatisfied with his level of intensity, putting in a lot of work and time still and not really ever feeling it, not really feeling satisfied like he was able to pull that lever and lean into the sticking points and we figured out he’d be doing 15 rep sets way too much work. And then I looked at the reps that he’d been submitting and it made a lot of sense that they were much less intense. There was a lot less sticking points in these reps. If you were training like this, doing the equivalent of 10 sets in a single rep, you cannot be aiming to do the same amount of training as you would normally do. As I said at the start of this video, if training for more than 40 minutes a week would get better results, that’s what I’d be doing.
That’s what I’d be teaching everyone to do. But the fact is that you quickly hit a wall in how much work your body can actually recover from and benefit from each week. And so the stat that we’ve observed across a lot of people sit somewhere around 12 to 18 minutes of working time per week. So that’s six movements. Once set each of about two or three minutes done once a week. After that point, when the set turns into a grind, it stops being fun. You start to have difficulty putting in that max effort work, you start to hit this level of diminishing returns, you start to cut into your recovery work. You actually get negative effects from trying to do more and you dilute the quality of the training that you’ve already been doing because you can’t sprint for an hour. And in the same way, you can’t train at max intensity for an hour.
The human body just doesn’t work like that. So we need to be ready to tap out and as I’ve mentioned, the rule is once it’s no longer fun, you’re done. Which makes me think immediately of the single leg squat. I remember I had a lot of trouble getting into training legs consistently, and the reason was I was trying to do so much work. This movement, if we do it properly, is so taxing. What sticking point looks like here is you get to the bottom of a single leg squat, you load 60 kilos, 90 pounds on your back, and you start trying to do that single leg squat unassisted. Go and dry this. Now, if you’ve got a medium sized human you can put on your shoulders, use that for now and try. It’s very difficult. And so then what we do is we try, we fail, we push against resistance for a second.
We then help ourselves up just with our hands, with our other foot to get up an inch and then we try again with no assistance to get the next inch. Doing that one or two reps a week is all high. I’ve done since I started training legs consistently, it is ample, this movement’s so brutal that it wasn’t until I had the audacity to think, okay, one rep a week could work, started doing that, that I realised it was plenty. I’d just been putting pressure on myself to do more than my body was physically happy doing each week. It’s not like traditional training. Remember that as you get up through the squat, you get to a point eventually somewhere towards the middle top where you no longer need assistance and then you can just foster it. There’s no more sticking point Once you’ve reached that point where there is no more sticking point, the rep’s effectively over because they’re no longer at our limit, we’re no longer at a hundred percent, and this is why we need so much external load because the bottom might be really heavy, but that’s fine.
We can add assistance. The more weight we have, the more of that range of motion we can actually load to a hundred percent and actually get effective work done through that range. And the more range of motion that we build to strengthen, the more strength we gain, the more muscle we gain, the better our bodies look and function. The most common mistake I see people running into with this, I’ve coached a lot of people through this process by now, is rushing through. If you rush through this, you don’t give yourself time to adjust and get things right and you also don’t give yourself time to pull that lever to really lean into pushing against that sticking point, which is where you get the results. And so the easy way to approach this is just break your movement up into 10 separate mini movements. Treat each inch like its own rep where you’re fighting for everything to get it, and then you allow yourself to just get it and then you adjust because every point in the range of motion is going to require slightly different difficulty to match your maximum strength.
And so if you give yourself the time to just do it one at a time, then one rep can be all you need per movement for the week for the plan to push up. What that looks like is getting to the bottom. And if you’ve failed to the bottom, then you can just start there because if you failed to this point, then you’re not going to be able to reverse it because you’re failing. So as long as your shoulders are leaned forward far enough in front of your hands, you should start pushing. Your chest is burning and you’re stuck. All you can then do is back off, bring the rings a bit further forward, reduce that lean until you can move. You might need to bring a foot down in front of you to help, and then you get the next inch and then you stop and then you might load it back up, try and add more lean, make sure you get stuck again and you can repeat the process, use your foot back off the lean, and you just keep doing this iteratively, inch by inch all the way to the top of the rep.
You do 1, 2, 3 reps of this. As soon as you’re not enjoying it, you call it a day. And that’s it. That’s the final exercise that we have. Six done for the week shouldn’t take you more than two or three minutes each movement, all you need to do to build fully functional, fully athletic, lean, fantastic looking and functioning body is apply this principle to these six movement patterns that we’ve gone through today. You train them each once a week. If you’ve got the ability to split them up, let’s split it like this into pairs with a good rest in between movements. You could do one each day if you wanted to get a lot of rest, but this is how I do it. That’s three workouts a week. Each workout’s about 10 minutes. You do two or three minutes per movement, you’ve got five minute rest in between.
You do this every week over time as your strength increases. So two will the level required to reach that sticking point on each of your movements. And so you’re going to have to keep evolving your training as your body grows to keep up with it. And so progressive overload is built into this because you’re always cranking up the difficulty of your training to match your strength, to match the muscle you’ve built. All you’ve got to do is keep doing that, making sure you’re getting enough protein in sleeping, recovering, not trying to do any other strength training. And you’ll progress about as fast as your body is capable of progressing each week. If you’re like this, you want to get it all dialled asap, you can learn what it looks like to do all this as part of a fully comprehensive training and nutrition programme. Link in the description for that full free training.
And from there, if you’re interested in working together, you can find out more about that too. Otherwise, take this, use it. I wish there was a way of speeding up results, but the truth is, once you’re doing everything right, it literally is just a matter of time and your body’s own ability to develop. So the sooner you start doing something, the sooner you’re going to be able to have your body in a position that you’re stoked with. So get after it. Thanks so much watching. Here’s another video you can check out. Chat soon.