How training for 40 minutes a week took me around the world

Four years ago, most people who heard about my fitness routine thought it was either crazy or genius. They couldn’t believe the shape that I was in from training for 40 minutes a week and seemingly eating more than anyone else. Fast-forward to now, I have been travelling the world for the last six months teaching this system full-time to my amazing clients and sharing it online. And so in this video, I just wanted to share where this all came from, where it’s at now, what I honestly think about the system six years into using it and what my goals are with it now, which I am finding quite exciting. I started coaching fitness kind of because I was compelled to. I thought it was so ridiculous that I could have all the results I sort of ever wanted in terms of my physique, my strength, my body composition, my flexibility from training such an absurdly little amount each week.
When people heard 40 minutes a week, most would react as if they were missing something or there was some secret, and then I’d found the holy grail of fitness. And it’s funny now that more of this has taken off and gotten traction and people are using it and getting amazing results with it, the criticism has been that it’s not the most effective thing ever and I’m not the biggest person or the strongest person, and I’m absolutely not. But I got into this, started teaching kind of because I’m not the biggest or the strongest, and I’ve never really had aspirations to me. I just wanted to be really good. And it turns out that it doesn’t take that much effort to be really good. In fact, the disproportionate diminishing returns you get on more and more work is crazy. And that’s the whole reason I started my coaching business and this channel was to show people that if you just take the tiny, tiny initial amount of work in strength training, in nutrition, and just get that right, it’s like Pareto Principle was 20% of the effort that most fit, successful people are putting in and you get 80% of the results, which for many people who love the gym and love nailing their nutrition and want to go hard at being a bodybuilder or a callisthenics athlete or whatever, that extra 80% work is worth doing for the extra 20% of results.
But that’s sort of not the point of what I aim to teach. Before I started out, I would look around me at all the unfit people. I’m from Australia and just such a small percentage of people are strong and mobile and lean and healthy. And just those things, the difference that that makes to your life when you are at a lean, healthy body composition, when you have a decent amount of strength, the difference that just makes purely to your longevity and the quality of life as you age, ignoring getting into really good shape and the crazy difference that makes to your confidence and to how you carry yourself and the social ripples that creates around you. You become more attractive, you become the best physical version of yourself. Ignoring that, just the base quality of life that comes from having a tiny amount of strength training in your week and some fundamental easy nutrition, one decent meal each day.
This stuff’s as hard to not do as it is to do. And so my vision to this point has just been showing people that there is no excuse. You can do it. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how weak you are, how stiff you are, how time-strapped you are, how bored you are of exercise. If you do a small amount of effective work, once you build the routine, once you learn the skill, it becomes as easy to do it as to not do it. And so I’ve had a lot of success changing that perspective entirely in the coaching programme and from all the comments I receive from you guys on YouTube. So that’s clearly working and it’s resonating with a lot of you, which is amazing because I just think it’s such a waste of life to not go through it at least in reasonable shape.
Building your body up is one of the most satisfying, rewarding things if it fits with the rest of your life and if it’s a trade-off of time and effort that you’re happy with. Now, teaching that has afforded me the amazing freedom to kind of do what I want and be where I want as I do this. And being able to travel the last six months has gotten a lot of the desire for fun and excitement out of my system. And I find myself now wanting to take both business and training way more seriously. And for me, one really flows into the other. So I think in terms of the training system, I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life in terms of my physique. I’m extremely stoked with it, but you always want to be better. And so while this really simple, easy 40 minute per week training system has gotten me amazing results, I want to be bigger, I want to grow more muscle, I also want to be stronger and find out what it takes to build some of these higher level calisthenic skills.
Now to date, I haven’t optimised for either of these things. I’ve just had a very simple system that has been really effective at getting me stronger by building muscle in a basic handful of movement patterns. It’s been fun and it’s been easy, but there are kind of two directions that I am exploring now in terms of what to add to that 20% to get some of the remaining 20% of results to use that model. So the first has been pure muscle growth, and I’m going to expand on all of this more in future videos, but this is just to give you context. I’ve talked about two of the experiments that I’ve been running recently with the goal of improving that. They are going extremely well so far, very promising earlier results. The clients I’m working with doing that also going really well. So that’s reasonably simple, small time trade-off, a lot more potential growth, and I’ll do a specific update soon on how that’s going.
The other avenue for improvement is specific strength. Now to date, this system, and what I think is so beautiful about with its simplicity, it has just been a hypertrophy system using six basic movements. You essentially build more raw strength in these six planes of motion and you build muscle accordingly. And these six movements are incredible at building byproduct strength that carries over to a lot of callisthenics ability. So if you see me doing levers and handstand presses and bend arm planches, all these sorts of things, that has all just been byproduct strength of these six basic movement patterns and getting stronger in them without actually any skill work or specific programming to practise the moves and optimise for high level calisthenic strength. The result is that you get a really good physique out of it and you get some really good strength, but there are movements in the callisthenics world like planches that are extremely difficult to achieve without specifically training in a way that is designed to achieve them.
And so that’s another avenue I’m exploring is finding out what the trade-off is to integrate specific work to build those higher level, harder movements like planches within the context of this very simple time-efficient training. Again, that’s to unpack more in another video. But all this ties back to what is the goal? What is my goal with training? And if you follow me or work with me, what can you actually expect to get? Because yes, there are trade-offs to training in such a simple and minimal way. There are also massive trade-offs to doing anything more extensive and complex. What I have always optimised for and what I am continuing to try and get to an even better degree is the most direct, no nonsense way to build a strong, muscular, lean, powerful body using simple body weight training in a way that gets us as much byproduct, indirect functional strength as possible without having to be in the gym every day, drilling skills like a gymnast or living on the bars like a callisthenics athlete.
Those are valid pursuits, but they’re not part of the life I want to live. I want the best possible functional system for people like me with lives, with other things I want to spend their time on, who want their training and nutrition sorted to support that life, getting them looking incredible and moving like a beast from a few short, intense training sessions each week, and a great, flexible, enjoyable diet with most of their time filled with rest and low intensity movement as desired. That’s what I’m optimising for. So as I continue researching, experimenting, I plan to share it all on here so that you guys have access to it. I want to be completely transparent with everything I’m doing. Obviously all my students inside Ringstrong have access to the most cutting edge stuff dependent on their goals, but ultimately I want to make these systems accessible to everyone so that whether you can afford coaching right now or not, you at least have access to the information that you need to make this all happen.
So to all my past and present students and to every single one of you who has supported the channel and the business so far, thank you. Thank you for all your feedback and your positivity in the comments. I do read them all. I’m always trying to make my content as practical and useful as possible. I’m still learning, so thank you for your patience and your ongoing support and positivity. It truly does make the life of a creator so much easier and more meaningful. So appreciate you all. Looking forward to sharing a whole lot more good stuff in the months to come. If you’ve got requests, you know where to put them. Much love from Spain. I