I only train 40 mins/week (here’s the other half)

This video demonstrates a comprehensive 20-minute weekly training approach split across two sessions, focusing on vertical pushing, vertical pulling, and leg training. Jack details how high-intensity, constant-failure training can generate significant training volume and stimulus without excessive time investment. Key topics include strength testing protocols for body weight movements like one-arm chin-ups and handstand push-ups, the importance of measuring progress relative to body weight, and how to manipulate training volume through intensity rather than set quantity. Jack also discusses a recent aggressive two-and-a-half-week fat loss period that reduced body fat from approximately 12% to sub-10% while traveling, explaining nutrition strategies focused on protein prioritisation and appetite-driven calorie deficits. The training philosophy emphasises maximising relative strength, maintaining aesthetic goals, and recovery prioritisation. The complete session totals approximately eight minutes of actual training within a 21-minute gym visit, demonstrating that effective strength and muscle gains are achievable with minimal weekly time commitment when every training repetition is performed at maximum intensity until failure.

In a recent video, I showed you half my week’s training coming in at a total of 20 minutes. This is the other half. Between these two sessions, this is everything I do to build my physique. Today is vertical push, vertical pull, and the other half of my legs. I’m going to show you the whole thing I cut and explain exactly how I make this work with such low weekly training time, including how I manage training volume, how I test my strength, and how I recently dropped from about 12% to sub 10% body fat in the course of a couple weeks while travelling. So I’m going to start with vertical pulling here, training for my one arm chin ups. As I spoke about in a recent video on injury management, I’m just doing some direct work on my wrist flexor tendons, giving them a little love before I get into my pulling work.
Just doing that has allowed me to fix my golfer’s elbow and get back into this heavy one-up chin-up work. So I’m really happy with where they’re at. They’re feeling good. So you’ll notice on both upper body movements today, I start on reps that are not constant grinding max effort, but I’m actually doing a strength test. So because here for the one I’m chin up, my measure of strength, my frontier of progress for this movement is how much range of motion I can get doing a full unassisted one on chin up. When I’m fresh before I start my actual training set, that’s when I’m doing a test to see where I’m at with that. And it still acts as training in that I’m trying as hard as possible. But the reason I’m not doing full range of motion reps like I do here is because I want to have a clear measure every session of where I’m at with it.
The figure thing with body weight training is that because it’s all dependent on how much body weight you’re pulling, yeah, I’ve been able to do one-up chin-ups in the past and can’t now, but I’m significantly heavier now than I was when I’ve been able to do full-range one-up chin-ups. So that’s something to bear in mind and it’s why it’s important to be measuring your body weight all the time so that you have reference points for how strong you are at certain weights, how you look at certain weights. Because with this style of training, we’re not just measuring weight go up on a barbell. It’s all about relative strength. So how strong you are for your body weight. And this is also why it’s important to know what your goals are. I’m not trying to be the best callisthenics athlete in the world. I’m also not trying to be the biggest bodybuilder looking dude in the world.
I want to be as aesthetic as possible and as strong as I possibly can to form my body weight. And I think those goals go so well together. If you can maximise your relative strength, i.e. Be as strong and lean as you can, then your physique sorts itself out and you end up having a very good time. So could I be better at callisthenics if I was lighter? Yeah, probably I have been. Could I go and optimise my nutrition for bulking and gain as much mass as possible and be a lot bigger than I am now yet without a doubt. I don’t really want either of those things. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone. I want to feel really strong and be progressing consistently with my training, but also enjoy the fruits of my labour as I go wake up every day and love what I see in the mirror.
And so the decisions I make around nutrition, fat loss, et cetera, all revolve around that goal. So I come back to my recent fat loss period. What I want to talk about quickly here is training volume because I think this is a really important point that gets missed when we talk about 40 minutes a week of strength training, people naturally think that it is low volume when that is not the case at all. If you watch me training here, I’m constantly at max intensity. I’m constantly failing. So every second of this work that you’re watching is like the end of a set that is taken to failure, those last couple of seconds of work. So when you’re doing sets with a barbell or a machine and you’re forced to stop the set once you hit failure, the only way to manipulate volume is to change how many sets you do.
And so if you want to do more work, you’ve got to add more sets and that requires resting in between them and it takes a fair bit of time. When you’re doing this, constantly just training at your max. You’re accumulating the same effective volume, the same stimulus as 10, 20, 30 traditional fixed resistance sets within a single set of training. And so if you want to do more volume, you just continue the set. You don’t need to do another set, you don’t need to do another workout, you just keep going. And the rule of thumb I use is I just keep training. I keep accumulating volume until I can’t sustain the same quality of training, the same max effort output because volume only counts when it is sufficiently intense. A set doesn’t do anything unless you take it too failure or very close. And so once I find myself literally unable to push with everything I’ve got and sustain that maximum 100% intensity, then I realise that I’m not getting anything more out of my training.
With all my clients, I say, you can do as much training as you want. Keep going, scratch the itch. Until you are satisfied, you can continue training as long as you want. The only rule is that you do not let that detract from your intensity. If in the back of your mind you are planning to do more work, more sets, more reps, whatever. And in order to do that, you are training less intensely now to preserve yourself and last the workout. That is when volume becomes detrimental because it’s no longer more volume. It’s the same effective volume spread over more work. And that comes with a host of negatives. One obviously being it takes longer, but still training like this, you’re not going to be training for very long anyway, but the fact that you’re reducing the intensity of your output means that there’s no extra gains and you’re still accumulating more wear and tear on your joints or connective tissue and that is why I only train for as long as I do.
Not because I don’t want to spend time training. I love this stuff, but because the limiting factor is literally your body and fatigue and at a certain point you just need to go home and recover. By the way, if you want to see how all these movements fit together, the progressions from beginner to advance along with what each movement is actually building, I’ve put them all into a simple guard which you can download for free using the link bullet. That brings up the topic of training splits and I have recorded this second workout to show you how you can split your training into two if you want and I was doing this for a while whilst on the road with a more random schedule. But now that I am somewhere for a longer period of time, I’m back to three sessions a week, two movements per session.
So these two movements you’ve seen now together, my other push and pull together and my legs together on a different day. And the logic there is really just spreading out both the training itself, meaning I can push harder each session and the recovery meaning my body’s got less tasks to do it once. So you can see my hands up pushup training here. I started the same way doing strength testing, how many free standing handset pushups I can get. I’m trying to get these cleaner and be able to do them without any balance assistance from straps or a wall. And then the rest of the set, literally just doing full range of motion reps, constantly failure up and down. Switching between progressions as needed, you see the full spectrum of those here just to keep every inch of work at max intensity. Now you might notice that I’m quite a bit leaner here than in the last instalment of this video and that’s because in between these sessions I ran about a two and a half week mini cut to reset my body fat.
That puts it at about eight weeks since my last cut before I came overseas, which is less time than I’d usually like. I want to have blocks of at least three months at maintenance, just accumulating muscle. But I spent about seven weeks in Columbia drinking a lot, eating out a lot, not worrying at all about calorie intake and just accumulated a bit more fat, a bit faster than I’d like. And so when that trip ended, I had some time to myself, appetite was low. I took the opportunity to just do a really quick reset and so did quite an aggressive cut. Generally, if you were trying to lose more body fat, I would suggest going slow, no faster than half a kilo a week, 500 calorie or 20% deficit, but I just wanted to get this done quickly. So I did more like 700 to a thousand calorie deficit a day.
And at this point, honestly, I’m just doing these things very intuitively. My appetite was so low. I didn’t even desire going higher than that, so I just went faster because it felt good. If you’re cutting and it’s properly difficult, then I highly suggest you listen to your appetite as well in that sense and eat more and do it slower because going too fast makes it hard to sustain. It’s also not ideal for muscle maintenance. In this case, it was very short and it felt fine. I didn’t get hungry until the end. By the time I was two and a half weeks in and starting to want to eat more, you can see I’m already very lean and so super happy with that, stopped the cut and now I’m back to just enjoying tacos and eating as much as my body desires. And so the way I did that was really simple.
In this period, I was mainly cooking for myself. So I just prioritised protein first thing in the day, meat, dairy, eggs, fruit, and once I’d hit 140 grammes of protein for the day, I would just titrate up the rest as desired, getting some food out, having a triple scoop ice cream, whatever I needed, but then still hitting a really solid deficit. When I’m comfortably lean, I find training more fun. I find life more fun. And so I think, again, the rule of thumb, I always say cut until it’s hard and then you’re good. And where you see my body fat at now with my level of muscle mass, which bear in mind has taken me over 10 years to build, this is a level of body fat that is easy for me to get to and sustain. I do not have any special lean genetics.
I’ve just worked for a decade to build enough muscle to the point where I’m now at a very healthy body weight at this level of body composition. So I see intermediates and plenty of coaches saying that getting really lean is not worth it. Getting leaner past the point where it’s difficult is not worth it, but you can get really lean before it’s difficult if you do it properly and if you have enough muscle mass. And I think that people just massively overestimate how much muscle they’ve got on them and massively underestimate how much more they need to build in order to get properly lean and feel good there. So take this all as a very optimistic note. You only need 40 minutes a week to make as much strength and muscle gain as possible if you make every second of that effective volume, you make it count and you can get really aesthetically lean without it being difficult and feel great and have high libido, high energy once you’ve built enough muscle mass to earn it.
So that’s my entire session coming in at a total training time of seven minutes and 57 seconds. From the timestamps, I was in the gym for 21 minutes, so pretty much on schedule. You guys don’t have to set up a camera out, so there’s no excuse not to be doing that quicker. Hope that was useful.