Is 40min a week enough for muscle gain?

I have only trained for 40 minutes a week for the past six years and it has allowed me to achieve everything I’ve wanted from my body. But research consistently shows that higher volume training produces faster strength and muscle gain. So how much progress have I been sacrificing by not doing more? In this video, I want to break down the science behind this and bring you behind the scenes in a new experiment that I’m running to find out. What causes muscle growth to happen in the first place? For this discussion, we’re going to assume that you’re already training each muscle group at least twice a week. We’ll cover this further in an upcoming video. Before a given workout, what causes your muscles to grow? There’s one factor that all modern research has more or less converged on and that is mechanical tension. Now this happens at the level of individual muscle fibres.
The easiest way to think about it is that if you were trying to push a load as fast as you can and the movement is slow purely because it is so heavy, that involuntary slowing is a sign of high mechanical tension and that is the sort of work that signals to your body to build muscle and get stronger. So when we talk about the part of a set or the part of a rep that is the effective growth signalling work, it’s those moments when you are grinding, pushing as hard as you can, but despite your best effort, you’re barely able to move. And that’s why if you never take anything near failure, you never grow. And that’s why you can spend a lot of time training not getting great results. Now, how much of this grinding grunt max effort work do you need? Well, it’s a fuzzy subject and it’s measured in lots of ways, but the most common way it’s measured in science is sets taken to failure, which means at the end of that set, as you push for failure, you get effective reps where you achieve heart mechanical retention and signal growth.
Now the way that I have trained for six years now I teach my students to train is rather than having a set that builds up to failure and achieves effective reps right at the end, which is where this happens, we basically cut out all of this buildup work and just start at failure from the start of the set. So rather than going set to failure, rest, set to failure, rest, et cetera, repeating this process, we just go rep constantly at failure, another rep constantly at failure, another rep constantly at failure, et cetera, and then stop. And that’s essentially why instead of workout taking a lot of time, I spend 10, 15 minutes in the gym three times a week and then I’m done. And the idea is that you’re still accumulating the same if not more of this max effort work and therefore mechanical tension and therefore growth.
For example, if these are all sets to failure, that might be, let’s say, be generous, three seconds of work. It’s very easy to accumulate three minutes of work at your max if you’re just constantly scaling the movement to challenge you. Now here’s the key thing that I’ve missed to date in discussing this and looking at the research and running some experiments recently, it has been very interesting because while what I’ve done certainly works and has gotten me some amazing results as well as my clients in very little time. There are some important things I’m learning about this which do make a difference to how you approach it because the way I’ve thought about this today has been if you think about the maximum force output from your muscle, let’s say that its maximum capacity is here and that means to achieve maximum mechanical tension, therefore stimulate maximum growth.
We need to be working basically here. The way I’ve thought about this is that there is the muscle and that its current ability is the only real thing influencing force output and therefore as long as you’re always firing the muscle as hard as it can fire, then you’re maximising this. But there’s another thing to consider, which is your central nervous system, i.e. Your brain and your spinal cord, which is the system that signals to your muscles to fire. These guys can’t fire without being told by your brain through nerves in your spinal cord that it needs to fire. And so if your nervous system capacity is high, sweet, then that’s all good. It’s going to be able to tell your muscle too far as high as it can and then you get maximum signalling. But your central nervous system very quickly fatigues and as it does its ability to signal your muscles, particularly the motor units, the groups of fibres that can produce the most force and have the highest potential for growth, that very quickly diminishes.
And so with a bit of fatigue, you’re now at a level where your biggest groups of muscle fibres, your strongest ones, the ones that can grow can’t fire anymore and you’re left just firing the more endurance focused, smaller motor units. And so if our most important motor units, the big ones, the ones that produce the most force and have the greatest ability to grow and get you jacked, if they’re not getting fired now with a bit of fatigue, then suddenly our training doesn’t have a whole lot of purpose. We’re just contracting all these muscle fibres that aren’t really going to grow nearly as much, get us as strong, get us as big. Remember this force output here, this is on the level of the muscle, but the only muscle fibres that are going to grow are the ones that are actually getting signalled to fire.
And so recently I ran an experiment, and if you’re on my mailing list, you will have read about this. Without having my head around this model, I went, “Okay, you know what? I’m going to try adding in more sets to my workout and see what happens.” And so on top of basically what I was already doing here, I tried to add another set. It absolutely cooked me. I could not train. I just had no ability to push hard. My muscles felt awful. I felt like I was going to injure something very quickly and so I immediately cast this experiment to the wayside. But what I was experiencing wasn’t actually necessarily anything to do with muscle fatigue itself, but central nervous system fatigue. I had cooked my central nervous system to the point where its ability to do output just wasn’t there at all by the end of my first set, meaning if I tried to do more, I’m already down here in terms of output.
That signal is then getting to less and less motor units, only the small, really high endurance ones, which does not align at all with my goals of growth and increased maximum strength. But realising this was a very positive thing because what it’s telling me is that if we can just reduce this and cut out any work that’s below our ideal threshold of firing these quick fatiguing but high force output motor units that wants to get us jacked as opposed to these little scrawny ones that can go all day and theoretically all those negatives I was experiencing of fatigue, soreness, feeling like I was going to snap some shit up, they could all be diminished and we get even higher quality training. And so I planned a new experiment and so far the results have been pretty cool. Now before I get into the experiment itself and what this actually means for you training, if you want a complete system to build strength efficiently, all of this factored in.
I put together a free training, running you through the whole thing, linked that is into the description. So there are two parts to this. The first is the basic recommendation for your training and then the second is the experiment. In terms of training recommendations, I basically need to emphasise something I’ve said before but forgotten how important it is and that is quite simply doing less. Specifically your first rep is king. I have always said this and it’s something that I do emphasise with all my students who come into Ringstrom, but the way that I’ve conceptualised things before was that you have a diminishing returns on your set. Your first rep is going to get you most of the results that you’re going to see. You get a little bit less from the next and the next to the point where you’re not really achieving anything by continuing, you’re just kind of plateauing out in the signalling and that is 100% true.
What I probably haven’t emphasised enough, including in my own training, is that we’re not just accumulating muscle damage and connective tissue damage, we’ve also got the central nervous system fatigue to consider and that’s just going to keep going up and up and up to the point where I think very early on in your set, you’re actually probably getting no more benefits. It probably looks something more like this because once you’re not able to fire those higher threshold motor units anymore, the set is now essentially useless. You’re not triggering growth, but you are continuing to build up more and more fatigue, which means that later in that workout or even later in the week, you’re still impaired in your ability to fire those motor units for no advantage. So this means that you’re inhibiting your own capacity to signal gains but not getting more gains out of it, which is utterly crazy.
And so I’ve always been a preparative of less is more, but digging into this research is also convincing me that more is definitely less. Then give you a set like turning a tap on. Initially what’s flowing out is liquid gold. You want to capture that, this bit here, but what that very quickly turns into is not so nice of a liquid. And so as soon as that’s what starts coming out, you want to cut it off. When we get to the experiment in a second, I’ll give you some actual concrete numbers and rules of thumb for applying this, but just understand the concept for now. So as I said, the central nervous system fatigue can affect you within the workout and that might dissipate within five minutes or so, but there’s another type that also accumulates and that will last for much longer, multiple days depending on the severity of it.
I saw the second type recently when I skipped my first workout session in a long time. I was in Columbia at a five day festival and so I missed my vertical training session and when I hit it the next week, having had two weeks off training those movement patterns, even after a week of very bad nutrition and very bad sleep, I was so strong. I was hitting PRs on my hands and pushups and my one arm chin ups. I couldn’t believe how good I felt. I clearly just let some fatigue dissipate and I was getting back up to firing at maximum capacity, which allowed me to see my own strength gain and what my muscles were capable of. The issue is if you are constantly in that state of fatigue and always firing sub threshold, then you’re never using all the muscle strength that you have.
And as we said, it’s using your peak strength that is when you use all your motor units and actually stimulate the most growth. So we want to be training at the highest level possible because that’s when we stimulate the most gains possible. And so this can be a frustrating recommendation when you already feel like you’re doing such little training. If you’re training 40 minutes a week, all my hardcore students want to do is do as much as they possibly can in that set. And this is basically saying don’t do that because you start getting shit out of your tap, negatively impacting your performance and your progress. But there’s another option and that’s what brings us to the current experiment that I’m running. My original question when looking at training volume here was, is there an advantage to the gaps between sets? Is there any reason that having a rest between bouts of maximum effort is beneficial?
And what this model of nervous system fatigue suggests is yes, because if you allow your nervous system to recover, it means rather than doing this constant effort, which actually looks something more like this in terms of effective work, it means we get effective work repeated multiple times over a workout. And so I’ve basically been testing a hybrid of more traditional multi-set training with this constant skipping to max effort training. And while it’s way too early to give you any reports and actual results, I can talk about the experience so far and what I’m finding. And so what I’m basically trying is instead of the old model of basically doing horizontal push for two, three minute set, five minute rest and then horizontal pull three minute, what I’m basically doing is grabbing the first bit of that set, cutting the rest off and then resting at least five minutes before hitting it again.
The good thing about central nervous system fatigue is that even though the name says central, it is muscle specific. And so if you’re training antagonists like I suggest, training opposite muscles, one pushing, one pulling, knee extension, knee flexion in each of your sessions, then what you can do is just rotate between these two opposing movements and actually still do this really efficiently. So what this looks like now is horizontal push for maybe 30 seconds and I’ll tell you how to figure out how much to do, then a two minute rest and then horizontal pull. And so by the time you’re done two minute rest, 30 seconds at another two minutes, you’re nearly at five minutes and you’re ready to do movement one again. And that’s now a unit and you can do as many of them as you want. So how many sets? Well, anything is more than I’ve been doing.
So I’ve been trying the other end of the extreme, which is doing this times five. I’m already thinking that I’ll end up cutting that back something more like three, but based on most of the research, somewhere between three to five sets would be a classic recommendation. And so I wanted to have the most contrast possible, but I’ll probably end up cutting down to finding somewhere in between. Bear in mind that even though we’re adding more effective volume here, it’s probably still diminishing returns. So you’re still going to get most results from doing the first set, diminishing returns from every set you add in after that. This is just a way of minimising the downsides to continuing to train and actually getting something out of doing more rather than getting effectively nothing from doing more. What I have found so far is it actually sets two, three and four are the ones that feel the strongest.
I feel better on my second, third set. I’m able to push harder, do better front levers, better handstand, push ups, everything than on my first set, probably because my system is warmed up and fired and has had the practise of the first one. But this is a really positive early sign at least subjectively that what I’m doing at least feels productive. And the good news is here, you don’t have to worry about time efficiency much because if the old model was about an 11 minute session, three of those a week, just changing this, you could do the upper end here. This is still only taking you 23 minutes based on these numbers here. And so even that times three sessions is just over an hour of training a week, which again, if you’re worried about time or epic, you can still just do the same one set but actually spend less time on it.
If you want to quintuple your weekly volume, you’re not actually looking at adding that much time in here. If it goes to sweet spot of three sets, you’re looking at 13 minute workouts, which is still 40 minutes a week. So the key question here is if we’re cutting off the set earlier, how much do we actually do? The model that I’m running with this for now is similar to what I have been, but it’s a bit more nuanced. What I’ve said for a long time is going to, you can’t give it 100% anymore until you feel that psychological barrier to pushing at your maximum limit. What I’m playing with now is more objective and performance based and it’s once I can’t actually perform at 100%. Once my strength output starts to tank and I feel this dipping down, that’s when I’m calling it. So if I can do one rep, two reps, even three reps at my highest level of performance, whatever movement I’m doing, then I’m happy.
But if I’m doing one rep and then the second starts to feel weaker, then I’m going to call it right there. As I said at the moment, these are pretty short, a whole lot shorter than they were, but I’m still finding it difficult to hold back enough that I don’t start to experience serious fatigue in my third, fourth, fifth set. And I have noticed already that the movements that naturally tend to drag themselves out more, one, I’m chin ups, planche pushups, single leg squats, I’m finding that they’re the ones that I’m not wanting to keep going with in those later sets. The ones that are quicker, like front levers, hand sample shops, my performance is at its best here and I’m finding it really easy to go the distance with them. So less is 100% more, especially when you’re trying to do multiple sets. So we’re very early days with this.
I’ll obviously keep you guys updated with what I think about this, how my strength develops. But here’s what the experiments taught me so far. Your first set is by far what matters most and within that set, your first rep is by far the most important of what you’ll ever do for that movement for the week. So go as heavy as you can. All the research tells us is that we should be turning this tap off sooner rather than later. For the multiple set thing, yeah, this might make a difference. It also might not make that big a difference, but what we know and what I’ve learnt from coaching this for years now is that the basics are far more important. Bear in mind that 40 minutes a week, one set a week is all I have used to get to this point. So as exciting as optimising might feel, stop over complicating it and get the basics right of intensity and training technique and consistently doing that once a week for your basic movements.
Because the problems that I see holding people back from getting their bodies where they want them are not problems of optimal volume is that they just aren’t doing the right things with enough consistency and the right technique and intensity from the outset. In other words, if you’re not progressing, your problem is implementation. If you need a system, links below it, chutzpah.