How to maximise weekly training progress in under 40 minutes

This video outlines a training strategy that emphasises optimising the intensity and frequency of strength training rather than simply increasing training volume. [07:13] The key points are:

• The limiting factor in progress is not the amount of training, but how fast the body can adapt to the training stimulus. [01:23]
• There is a point of diminishing returns where additional training volume leads to greater fatigue and decreased productivity. [03:29]
• The ideal approach is to find the optimal weekly training stimulus that keeps the body in a growth-promoting state without excessive fatigue.
• This is accomplished by doing a single set of maximum-intensity training for each movement, once per week, and stopping when the training becomes no longer enjoyable. [06:58]
• This allows the body to fully recover and adapt before the next training session, leading to consistent progress with minimal overtraining. [09:12]

If you ask someone what’s the ideal amount of training to do each week, most people without even thinking about it, will assume it’s as much as possible. And this single assumption is the reason that more people fail to ever reach their goals than any other. I have seen if I could get bigger by training for more than 40 minutes a week, I would. If I could get stronger leaner, see faster progress in my physique, of course I would train for more than 40 minutes a week. When it comes to strength training, more work does not equal more results. And in fact, past a point, trying to do more work actually makes it exponentially harder to get results. And the tragic part is most people don’t even realise this is affecting them. And rather than pushing harder, if they simply cut back to the ideal volume for their body, they’d spend less time training, get injured less, find it mentally easier and far more fun, and actually see faster progress in their strength and physique.
So the big question is how do you figure out what this amount is? That is what I want to show you in this video. In part one, I want to show you why work is not the limiting factor to our rate of progress and look at what is and how maximal results can actually be achieved. And then part two, I want to get into the how to and show you the method that we use to make sure you are doing enough training to get the fastest results possible while avoiding all those downsides of trying to do too much. And if you want to do things smart, I’ll show you how we get this done in less than 40 minutes a week. It’s something we need to get clear on right off the bat and not understanding this will waste literally days, weeks of your life and lead to endless frustration.
What is the limiting factor on our rate of progress when we’re trying to build muscle gain strength, transform our physics? A lot of people go about things as if it’s the amount of work that they can put in to training, but if the limiting factor was work, why couldn’t someone just go and train for 12 hours a day for a month, get 10 years of training done and just instantly be jacked? For reference here, 40 minutes a week of training is more than I do, including rest time, which equates to less than 340 hours over 10 years, which is about the entirety of the time that I have been strength training. If you just train for 12 hours a day, you’d accumulate that in a single month and I have yet to see someone get these sort of results that quickly. So the limiting factor is clearly not the amount of work you do, it’s how fast your body can respond to the signal that you’re sending it.
So you can think about your body like a factory that produces gains. If we can get it running at capacity, then there’s nothing more that we can ask, right? So with this factory of our body, how would we produce the most gains possible? Well, it’s pretty logical. We would get it running at or close to its maximum production capacity 24 7, 7 days a week. We’d just be rotating workers, pumping out gains around the clock. And once that was happening, we would just want to make sure that nothing breaks or threatens the ability for our production line to just keep on pumping them out. And that is exactly what our goal should be with training. It’s to keep our bodies in the zone of growth, stimulate those changes to happen ideally fast and efficiently, allow the recovery and adaptation to happen and then go again. And then we just want to minimise the risk of anything happening that could stop us from doing that consistently week on week, every month of the year.
Things like injury, lack of time or low motivation, low energy, any reason you can think of that might stop your training, that is the threat to our factories level of production. And a huge part of this that so many people miss is about not overdoing the signal as a natural In order to grow, we need rest. We need time to recover for our body to go and make the adaptations that we’ve demanded of it. Through training, there is steeply diminishing returns in how much our bodies can respond to the training stimulus that we give it. So assuming we’re doing effective training, the more training we do, the more volume we’re accumulating for the week past this initial point, it gets less and less and less productive to do more. But at the same time, as we continue adding more volume, more training load to our week, we accumulate fatigue.
The only way to get rid of this is time, it’s rest and recovery. And so once we’ve done an initial bit of effective volume, if we keep training doing more volume, we very quickly get fewer returns for that effort. But we continue accumulating negatives in terms of unproductive damage that our bodies then need to go and recover from, which takes time in terms of the time it actually takes us to do this training volume. And then there is a psychological component where the more of this you do, the more damage you accumulate, the more you fatigue your body, the more your body’s going to behaviorally try and fight back against you and get you to stop doing that. And the only way that your body can tell you to do less, what is it? It’s by making you not want to train. It’s by killing motivation.
And so then you find yourself having to drag yourself out of bed, force yourself to the gym, force yourself to do another set. There’s a reason that this isn’t sustainable. It’s because your body’s very smart and it’s trying to tell you, Hey, you’re doing too much past a point. Most of what you’re doing here isn’t productive. You need to back off. And we perceive this as weakness. I don’t have enough willpower, I’m useless. We stop entirely, which achieves our body’s goal of getting us to kill all this unproductive work. But then we also miss out on the productive work that’s getting us the results we want. So theoretically there is a perfect outcome here. The key question is how do we get in this ideal zone of factory running at production without us putting unrealistic incentives on our managers to force overproduction and start having accidents in the workplace, onsite injuries, production line, halting altogether?
I hope you’re following my analogy here. In other words, how do we get in this weekly rhythm of sending that optimal stimulus to our body to grow as far as it can while minimising all this downside of any excess work that’s going to cut into our recovery and make training both physically and psychologically difficult to keep up? The beauty of this is if you set up your training right, it’s actually really easy to do. I think a lot of fitness culture has taught us to ignore our emotions, our intuition, no pain, no gain type culture. But as I’ve explained, this is just so destructive. Your emotions are there to help you. If you can figure out how to interpret them, listen to them, then they’re your best possible guard to all of this. Every emotional response you have to training is there for a reason, but if you give your body the wrong stimulus or the wrong options, or you have unrealistic expectations for your body that are just not productive or sustainable, it will appear that it is fighting against you.
In reality, it’s fighting against the ludicrous nature of what you’re expecting of it that will ultimately lead to bad outcomes. But we can fix that. The first step is to have the right structure for biofeedback. We want a framework. We want clear boundaries with our training structure because otherwise there are way too many variables at play. And figuring out what to change, what to listen to is going to be impossible. So first thing, we want to limit down all the variables in our training routine to one, because that way we can just listen to positive or negative emotion to know whether to do more or less of that variable. So in our training system, we’ve condensed this down to be very, very simple. And I go deeper into the how in other videos if you want to watch that. But the idea is constant maximum intensity.
So training that is sending the clearest possible signals to our bodies to grow. We only do that. We do one single continuous set per movement, start training, continue training, stop training, no rest, no multiple sets, nothing else to confuse us. And we do that on a fixed interval. So for us, that’s once per week per movement. It various ways of spreading out movements I’ll talk about in a sec. But that one set of max intensity for that movement gets repeated every single week. So this is really simple, repeatable framework. The only moving part, the only decision left to make is when to end the set. Just a side note before I continue this model, this constant max intensity method of training is the reason that when you apply this technique, optimal volume gets hit very easily in 40 minutes a week. If you are using less efficient traditional methods of training, it’s going to take longer.
These principles still apply. That said, I highly suggest you do train like this. I think it’s the best. So if you want to learn more about that, I’ll link some resources you can go check out. Okay, so we’re doing our one set for the week for our movement max intensity, up, down, up, down. How do we know when to call? How do we know when we have done the right amount for the week? This is where now that we only have one variable remaining. We can just listen to our bodies, to our intuition, which means doing what we want to do. And the catchphrase I use for this is just when it’s no longer fun, you’re done. If you’re unsatisfied with your set, you still have more in the tank, you still have a bit of itch, you want to scratch, you keep going, you do another rep, you push hard, you enjoy it.
But as soon as you reach that point where you feel like you want to rest, you feel like you need to suck yourself up for another rep, there’s emotional resistance that is your sign. Not that you’re weak or I’m motivated. That is your sign that you have done sufficient work for the week and you’re starting to hit this point of diminishing returns. Your body is so smart, it is literally feeding you these signals to say, Hey, we’ve reached a point where this is less productive than it was and we’re hitting downsides. Maybe you should take a break and call it and come back next week. And so as soon as you hit that point of resistance, that is exactly what you want to do. And you can very quickly spiral into overthinking this. This is why it’s so important to keep that structure really clear.
Minimal rest in between reps. One or two seconds max. Keep it as one set and only train one set once per week for the movement. Because the more you keep that structure rigid, the easier it becomes to make these calls. There’s no other decisions to make. And if you finish your set and start thinking like, oh, that was a bit early, I wish I’d done more, come back next week and give it. Hell. Remember this diminishing returns model. If you’ve done any training, if you’ve done a rep, you’ve done enough to signal growth, is it the most possible? Maybe, maybe not. But if it’s not, you’re sure as hell are going to recover fully and be ready to give it your very best next week, which is a site better than overdoing things, making it harder for your body to recover, making training less fun and then having to psych yourself up next week to even get there in the first place.
I think the most common question I get is people saying, oh, but what if I want to do more training when I get better results? As I said, if you want to do more, keep going. Don’t need your set. You don’t have to stop until you want to stop. But once that set is over, if you try and do more sets or more training throughout the week, just realise that you don’t somehow circumvent this whole system of your physiology. Like we’ve talked about the emotions, the feedback is all there to help you get this right. And so if you break your own system, your own structure by trying to do more, for instance, all you end up doing is diluting the intensity, the quality of the training that you do. Do you negatively impact your own recovery? Meaning you’re not going to come back as strong next week and then not train as well.
And that cycle continues and we lose this advantage of keeping behind this diminishing returns curve. We’re back to this battle against our own emotions. This question does come up a lot with students though, who do all their movements together in one single 40 minute session and go, I get halfway through the week and I want to do more. If that’s happening to you, then I very strongly suggest you do spread your movements over the week. So what this ends up being, if we want to look at optimal, I suggest to everyone to do their horizontal movements one day, push and pull legs another day, and then three to four days after you did your horizontals do your vertical push and pull. So that means that twice a week you’re hitting all your upper body muscles. And then once a week is P for legs. In my opinion, and this is ample, this is as ideal as situation as you get in terms of training frequency recovery, growth signalling to get that factory humming at max capacity all the time.
But just a caveat on that, remember that priority one with all of this is sustainability. So if you doing one single session once a week on a Sunday or whenever it is, allows you to stick to this more consistently over time, then that is absolutely what you go with. Whatever marginal difference this makes in rate of progress is less important than you just showing up every single week and doing the training because that is guaranteed to work long term. And skipping sessions is worse than that. So first, choose a structure that you can stick to every single week, unrelentingly, regardless of what life throws at you. And then you can think about optimising for faster, more effortless progress within that weekly structure. And that’s it. Once you’ve set up this structure and are listening to your emotional biofeedback, there’s nothing more you can do in terms of training volume to make faster gains.
If you want to look to somewhere productive to get faster progress, you want to fix your actual training technique. Most people I coach do not actually hit full maximum intensity across full range of motion. The most common mistakes, and these are what really hold people back, not the amount of training they’re doing, but either they’re not training full range of motion reps on all their movements. They’re not sustaining maximum intensity across that entire range of motion. There’s parts of the movement where they’re barely training intensity at all. They’re backing off, they’re not even aware of it, or they just don’t get intensity high enough at all, at any stage in their training, and any of these problems are going to undo you. They’re going to significantly reduce what you can get out of your training. So those are the places that I would look to get right.
Not doing more, but making what you do count. If you do that 40 minutes a week is more than you need to nail all of this, maximise that weekly progress. And when you’re getting this all right, you do not wish you could train more, take it from any of my students myself. You just look forward to the next time that you get to train and push harder and be stronger than the week before. If you want help nailing any of this is literally what I do in our programme, you can learn how the whole system works for free. Link is first one in the description. Otherwise, I really hope this video helps. Let me know what you want to learn more about in the comments. Always appreciate hearing from you guys. I’ll speak to you soon.