Full week of training – How to get strong in 40 minutes

I have for less than 40 minutes per week for over 5 years to build my current physique, and teach others how to do the same. [00:00] The key principles of our training routine are: [00:00]

• Focusing on full range of motion, high-intensity movements that push the limits of one’s strength
• Constantly adjusting the difficulty of exercises to keep each set maximally challenging [10:25]
• Performing both positive and negative portions of each movement with maximum effort [07:46]
• Avoiding unnecessary warm-ups or “fluff” work, and instead prioritizing the first, hardest rep of each set [02:03]
• Listening to your body and stopping a workout when it is no longer enjoyable [11:28]
• Using separate strength tests to measure progress on difficult exercises like one-arm chin-ups [12:16]

This straightforward, high-intensity training approach can yield significant results in as little as 11 minutes of working time per week. [12:56]

I have trained for less than 40 minutes a week for over five years to build my current body, and I teach other people how to do the same thing from all starting levels of strength, body weight, and ability. And I get a lot of questions on the specifics of our 40 minute routine, what exactly it looks like. And so today I thought I would just walk you through a entire updated version of the routine with a bit more of a detailed explanation so you can just see what a week in the life looks like and see just how simple and doable all of this really is. There are no tricks here. This is literally all I do for training. If you want more deep dives into the logic behind it all links some videos that you can watch as we go that get more theoretical.
But this video is purely about giving you a live demo so you can just get a sense of what brutally effective efficient training looks like from someone who has been doing it for quite a while. Now, first thing I want to note before we go any further is that what you are seeing here is training that is maximally effective for me, someone who has been training intensely for over 10 years, as we go through these movements, you’re going to notice I get tired and as I do, I scale down the progression I’m using accordingly to match that reducing level of maximum strength. If you are just getting into this, you’re not going to start anywhere near where I’m at, but all of these movement patterns that you’re watching me train are able to be scaled down all the way to where they require no strength whatsoever to complete.
So regardless of where you’re at, there is a level of progression that you can use. And the main skill with training is just learning to dial that difficulty to exactly the level that is maximally challenging for you, but doable. And so that’s what you’re seeing me do here constantly as I go is adjusting that difficulty to keep it maximally challenging, keep me getting stuck throughout the positives as I go up and then literally force me down through the negatives. So when you’re starting out with horizontal pushing that I would just be in a pushup position and adjusting the lean, how far forward your should’s going in front of your hands? You’ll see me here at the point where I’m using plant pushup variations. It becomes about how level I get my hips and then about how much I extend out from there with my hips level.
So you notice that I got straight into the work. One question I get a lot is warmups. What should you do? I have never found any value in doing lighter work before heavy work, and there’s not really any evidence that I’m aware of to suggest that this is actually going to prevent injury. That comes down to managing workload and recovery and actually giving your body the space it needs to heal. So I just put all my focus on using as much strength as I have in me on my first rep right from the start of the rep, and each time I come to train, that is all I care about. That’s how I’m measuring my strength, that’s how I’m measuring my progress, and that’s where I’m putting all my effort each week to improve the rest of the reps that you’re watching here I just see as a bonus.
So I’m continuing to train scaling the difficulty down to allow me to keep doing that because you notice I haven’t done anything anywhere near as difficult as I did on the first rep, and that’s because I’ve fatigued and because I was at my maximum strength, as soon as some fatigue is introduced, that maximum level of ability is going to reduce. And as soon as I’m feeling satisfied, like I’ve done enough or it’s no longer fun, I’m calling it there, I’m better off saving my energy for next week, coming back stronger on that first rep and that’s it. So that’s one of six movements done. That’s horizontal pushing out of the way. And then I’m moving on here to horizontal pulling. This is the same day I’ve gone away and rested for a good five minutes at least you kind of rest as long as you want.
If you wanted to, you could rest an entire day between movements. But because I choose to pair them up, I just make sure I give myself a good rest in between enough to feel fully recovered and ready to do the next movement. So you notice I did a strength test first of my front lever. That’s not super necessary, but I was just doing it for the video to be honest. It is important I’ll talk through later to test some movements, but because we’re going to see our maximum strength at the start of the rep anyway here, it’s fine to just get into the movement. And normally I would just start straight away with the front lever row. So this movement is just the inverse of the plant pushup. We’ve basically flipped things. The variable that dictates the difficulty is again just the horizontal distance between shoulders and hands.
So you notice every time I start the rep, I’m pushing the rings away towards my feet. And then again, when I’m in these front lever row positions with my feet off the ground, the first goal is to just get my hips level with my shoulders and once my hips are level, just extending my hips out towards a front lever position. So you see exactly like on the planche pushup here. I’m constantly adjusting that difficulty up so that I keep getting stuck as I try and do the positive. And then when I get to the top of the movement, I’m scaling it up even further so that I start to be forced down while doing everything I can to keep rowing up. So a huge key part of this whole method is not only training at maximum effort on the way up, but also failing on the way down.
So trying to continue to pull up in this case but making things so heavy that no matter what I do, my arms are literally pry away from me. I’m forced down, and this is training above our maximum strength threshold, not just add it. And this is extremely potent for signalling strength and muscle gain. So you notice I’m completely disregarding how pretty or consistent my training looks. I’m jumping between variations completely haphazardly. The point of training is not to have nice form and complete a perfect rep. When my students show me a really nice clean form repetition, I’m failing them instantly because it means that they are training below their maximum strength. Our goal with training for signalling strength and muscle gain is literally failure. And so if we’re able to demonstrate nice form and don’t need to change the level of progression that we’re doing or the positioning of our body, it means that our training is just missing the point.
There’s only three things we need to get right for our training to be bang on effective. We want to train full range of motion in the right direction or plane of motion, and we want every single inch in that range of motion to be as heavy as we can possibly handle both on the way up and on the way down. So we’ve skipped forward a day to my leg day. I think I just got back from a surf this day, so my upper body was pretty cooked, but I was ready to squat. So you’ll notice here I’m doing some pretty messy disgusting looking reps and that’s exactly the point I’ve just been making. You’ll see I keep getting up an inch and then falling back down, and that’s because what I’m doing is constantly trying to do the movement without any help, even though I know it’s too heavy for me.
I’m trying to do the full movement, which is this case, a 60 kilo unassisted single leg squat. And you’ll see every time I try and take that help away, I’m being forced down. So I’m actually getting a bunch of force negatives throughout the positive of this wreck, which is why all I did was the positives. I didn’t bother going back and doing separate negatives. A lot of details with your training that just really don’t matter as long as you are trying to do strength movements that are heavier than what you’re currently capable of. You’re trying throughout a full range of motion and you’re coming back and doing that regularly with enough rest and recovery in between. As long as you’re trying hard enough and actually giving it a go, actually trying to improve over time, you’re going to get results. What we’ve really done with this system is nothing that genius.
It’s just removing the barriers that normally get in the way of being consistent, doing those important things with your training and actually enjoying them. It’s not anti-science, it’s just anti time wasting. So I’ve gone away and had my good five minutes or so rest. I don’t really time this. I just sit on the ground for a bit and die. And then when I’m feeling like doing another set, I get on with it. This is a new DIY Nordic bench that I just rigged up after this video. So I was just playing around with getting it to work. And again, same thing here, just trying to do the full movement, which is a Nordic curl body, straight out, no arm assistance. So I’m just using as little help as I possibly can, thinking about pulling my heels to my butt as hard and as fast as possible the whole way, guiding myself up until I don’t need help, and then trying to straighten out my hips as much as I can again to keep it at that maximum difficulty, find that sticking point at every point in the rep.
So you can’t feel how hard I’m pulling except for maybe here when you can see I’m physically stuck, but I’m pulling very hard as on quite a few of these movements. I don’t necessarily do positive, negative, positive, negative. There’s no real rule to this. I generally do the same amount of positives and negatives, but the order in which I do them just basically depends on what I’m trying to measure progress on. So the general rule with training is that you want to use your energy at the start of your set to push progress on your frontier wherever you’re currently measuring progress in your maximum strength, whether that be unassisted negatives on your one-up chin apps or full body weight positives like you see me trying for here on my Nordics. Whatever you’re working to improve, use your strength when you’ve got it to work on that, and then you can get the rest of the work done once you’re fatigued.
This allows you to more aggressively push for progress on the aspect of the movement that you’re measuring progress on, but it also just makes training more fun because you can actually see yourself improving week to week faster. And that is a really important part of this. We want to be enjoying ourselves because otherwise what’s the point and how are we going to keep this up for 10 years? I can tell you right now I’ve not been as consistent as I have been by forcing myself to train when I don’t want to. I just actively enjoy this and as soon as I’m not having fun, as you can see here, I’m stopping anyway. So there really is no downside other than 10 minutes out of my day to doing this. And the benefits are my entire physique mobility and general wellbeing. So that’s day two done.
I’m generally doing those two workouts Monday, Tuesday, and then on Thursday or Friday I’ll come and do my final workout of the week, which is vertical pushing. So we’re starting with handstand pushups. You’ll see I’m starting with a couple of positives because this is my frontier. I’m working on these freestanding handstand pushup positives, and so I’m working that for the first few reps. The variable with handstand pushups is how much of your body weight is on your hands. So you’ll see as I fatigue with this, I’m going to start to use more of the ring strap to help me, and then I’m going to end up putting my feet down on that chair. And then as things get even heavier, you’ll see me later move my feet to the floor. And so I’m just again, like with everything, constantly scaling things down to allow myself to keep moving, but then scaling up as soon as it does get easy so that I stop myself, get stuck, and I’m able to have resistance to push against with maximum intensity so that I can work as hard as possible for as little time as possible and signal those strength gains really quickly.
You’ll notice there’s never a positive and negative that have worked at the same progression, and that’s a clue to what I was talking about before, where the positives we want to match to our maximum strength to get them at a hundred percent or very close to it. But then the negatives we’re going to need to make even heavier because we need to reverse the direction of motion. And so that’s why I’m jumping up here to stack more body weight on my hands than I was pushing up with to actually force me down. So all of these movements at all points in time, I’m trying to push up or pull up or squat up as hard and as fast as I possibly can. And the only difference in the speed and direction of motion is how difficult I’m making the movement. So each of those difficulty variables that I’ve been talking about, I’m just adjusting that constantly as I train either up or down to keep the movement travelling in the direction and at the pace that I want it to.
With hands and pushup, it’s important to adjust the foot position to change the difficulty rather than letting hips drop because as I said before, we want to keep the movement always in the vertical plane of motion. So if our hips drop when we get into horizontal territory and then we’re just doing plange pushups. So you’ll see here I always keep my hips up and if I need to make it easier, I just drop my feet down to the ground. And these sets I was filming for you guys, I went pretty hard. I did a lot of work. I was considering doing more here for a second and then just decided I was cooked and didn’t want to, which is again, really important that you listen to your body to tell you when you’ve done enough because if it’s not an emotionally enjoyable experience anymore, it’s probably not a productive one.
So I know we’ve been conditioned to completely ignore that intuition and just suck it up. No pain, no gain. Pretty destructive. If you’re not having fun, go home. Your body needs time to go recover and build that muscle. Go eat some food, sleep and come back stronger next week. So I mentioned before about strength testing. You’ll notice most of these movements we’re actually seeing our strength progress just by monitoring how heavy we can make that first ramp each week. The issue with the unilateral movement, so your one arm chin-ups and your single leg squats is that there’s not really as distinct progressions between not being able to do them and the full movements, which are extremely heavy and are going to take you years and years to get to if you ever get to them. So one thing we’ve started doing is planning strength tests at the start of your set just for the one arm chin up and the single leg squat.
So you can actually monitor progression in your maximum strength and actually have that positive feedback at each stage of the journey. So that’s why you see me at the start. They’re doing some partial unassisted, one arm chin up. That’s just where I’m testing my frontier at the moment. And so that’s what I’m doing in early stages. You can measure two arm chin-ups and with the single leg squats, you can measure unassisted, unloaded, single leg squats, negatives, positives. There’s a lot of lower level progressions that you can measure before you start training and then work on improving that level that you’re measuring with your actual training set. So you see me doing here now, full range of motion reps maxing out at every point just like with everything else. So with this movement, again, it’s just an inverse of the handstand pushup. We’re just adjusting how much of our body weight is on our pulling arm and we can add assistance with our feet and our other hand.
And in my case, when the negative is too easy, we can add extra resistance with an external weight. So that is pretty much it. That’s an entire week of training. I just ran the numbers and it came out at 11 minutes total of working time across those six movements. So when I say 40 minutes a week, I’m being pretty realistic. If you add in all the rest, all the setup, all the fluffing around, and you did them all back to back in a single session, which I don’t recommend doing unless you need to. 40 minutes a week should be more than you need to make all the gains you could want. So I hope it is useful if you’re interested in learning more about what we do and how you can get help to implement this yourself. You can see a full breakdown in my free training link is in the description, and lemme know in the comments what you’d like to see more of. I’ve been getting lots of great questions and I want to make these videos as useful and practical for you guys as possible so you can just get stuck in think life is just so much better in a strong body and achieving it does not have to be this big time consuming ordeal that it’s made out to be. And hopefully this gives you a demonstration of that.