One of the biggest lies in the fitness industry is the idea that we need loads of volume in order to build strength and muscle—numerous workouts per week, heaps of exercises, incessantly training as if continuing to do more work will somehow result in equally more progress. I suppose it seems so intuitive that many don’t even stop to question it.

But this idea just doesn’t reflect how the human body works. Worse than simply waste people’s time, this belief actually hinders a huge majority of people from getting the results they otherwise could: By throwing at us an onslaught of movements it brilliantly distracts people from focusing properly on the few things that are actually giving them results; it makes it near impossible to be efficient and get the most out of our reps, as energy is spread thin across a large amount of weekly work; and, possibly worst of all, it can lead those who do manage consistently train with serious intent towards overtraining and injury that would be otherwise avoidable. 

I think if everyone knew how little training they could get away with while making incredible progress in their strength and body composition (meaning more muscle, less fat), then many more would be jumping onboard for the unparalleled benefits that strength training can give us. 

Let’s strip back strength training to its core and look at how you can harness it using an absolute minimum amount of work to reap elite progress in strength and muscle development and enjoy improved body composition for life, without having to ever enslave yourself to the gym.

Intensity Is The Key To Progress

The cornerstone of effective strength training is this: Working at your absolute maximum strength capacity elicits by far the greatest adaptive response in terms of strength and muscle mass. In simpler terms: Lifting at your max = max gains. 

Ideally, if we wanted to only spend time on work that was going to result in the most progress possible, we would waste no reps working sub-maximally; no more sets of seven moderately easy reps followed by one or two actually difficult ones. Instead, every rep we do would be an attempt at exerting our peak strength at that point in time. 

Now, with a barbell or other weights, this is somewhat difficult to achieve while still getting any reasonable number of reps in. Reverse pyramid training (RPT) provides a reasonably effective solution. This is where you load the first set the heaviest to basically perform a 4-6 rep max, then reduce weight on each subsequent set to allow more reps (e.g. 8, then 10) as fatigue sets in. Every set is pushed to maximum capacity, and load is simply reduced to allow you to continue hitting reps. This method is simple, easy to implement, and allows extreme focus on the core factor that drives training progress: lifting as heavy as you can (while still getting reps in) and increasing that weight workout-to-workout. It works, and for barbell work I highly recommend it. 

One reason I love bodyweight training, however, is that intensity is controlled not by pre-loaded weight, but by the form or variation that is used. This means that, much the same as RPT, you can start a set by attempting the hardest variation of a movement possible, and then scale it back as you continue, but now not just set-to-set; here you are able to adjust the load within the set, and even better, within individual reps, based on whatever strength you are capable of exerting at that point in time. In this way, every single rep becomes essentially a one-rep max throughout the full range of motion, regardless of the length of the set.

This style of max-intensity-only training is the most effective method I have every employed in my training career, and in that of my students. It is the epitome of doing nothing but the most effective work. As you might expect, it is also extremely taxing. Which brings us to our next variable.

Keep Frequency As Low As You Need

When you are pushing your strength to its limits every set you perform (and preferably, if you are using bodyweight training, every rep), there is no longer any wasted volume. The same reason it is so effective also makes it extremely fatiguing: You are constantly pushing your body to the limits of its strength capacity. Therefore, we need to ensure that we give our body time to recover and adapt. That way, when we come back and throw further stimulus at it, we can perform slightly better, and elicit a further adaptive response. 

Lift at max capacity, recover and adapt to be slightly better than before. Repeat. 

That is the process. So basically, our training frequency needs to be low enough such that when we return to working a given movement pattern again (e.g., one-arm chin-up), we are fatigue-free and feeling eager and ready to go again, this time slightly stronger than before. 

What this means in terms of days will vary person-to-person, but if you are working with sufficient intensity, a week between sessions of the same movement works very well (once per week). 

Train as hard as you can, and see how you feel. With a bit of experience you will be able to tell when you are ready to hit the same movement again with everything you’ve got—remember, your emotions are there as a useful guide, not a hindrance! Use this rule of around 7 days’ rest as a benchmark, and listen to your body. If you feel strong and pumped to go again, you’re ready to go again.

A note on training splits

How you divide your movement patterns between sessions (AKA your ‘training split’) is up to you. You do not need to work everything in a single session, although this is certainly doable and excellent for people with a busy weekly schedule. I use five movements (a horizontal push and pull, a vertical push and pull, and a squat) and prefer to split them into two sessions, each of which is done once per week. This results in a weekly routine like the following.

Monday: horizontal push, horizontal pull, squat

Thursday: vertical push, vertical pull

You could equally do one movement each weekday, or any other split you can think of. The main thing here is the frequency of each movement pattern, not of workouts. Choose a setup that makes sense to you and your lifestyle and run with it. 

Volume Is Not A Practical Metric – Focus on Intensity and Measure Progress Instead

My belief (from extensive testing and generating results) is that by properly combining intensity and frequency as described above, measuring volume in the traditional sense becomes almost obsolete. 

Obviously, you need to do some amount of work to elicit a tangible response from your body. Volume (referring generally to the total amount of “work” done; measurable as force output × time under tension) is necessary for growth. However, using the bodyweight method of constant maximally intense training followed by ample rest and full recovery, deciding on a weekly volume target is no longer relevant or really important. 

There are two issues with trying to hit a certain volume target using this style of training:

  1. Volume is impossible to measure. Depending on how long your reps take and how much force you are exerting at each point in the range of motion, volume will change every time. There is no practical way of quantifying it other than listening to the signals your body sends you about fatigue.
  2. Increasing the reps does not increase the volume. It is physically impossible for your body to work at 100% force output capacity for more than a small handful of reps. If we try to stretch that out over more reps / sets (and believe me, I’ve tried), all we get is diluted quality work—your nervous system will simply not allow you to sustain your absolute highest quality effort. Yes, we’ll get more “reps” in, but the same work capacity will now be spread out over those reps, meaning the true “volume” (force × time) will end up being very much the same. And what did we say was the driving factor of progress? Intensity. There is zero point in sacrificing that intensity to simply hit an arbitrarily chosen higher number of reps because you heard somewhere that it’s important for your gains. 

So what can we do to manage our weekly volume and optimise progress? Thankfully, our body has all the answers. 

If you use the bodyweight training method and, by adjusting the difficulty as you train, truly aim to work as hard as physically possible at every stage of each rep, it will not take you many reps to exhaust yourself. The protocol I use, and teach all my students (to insane results), is to perform ONE set per week per movement, using as few reps as possible in order to reach the point where you can no longer exert your maximum strength. I generally find this to take somewhere between one and six reps per set, depending on the day, but the number itself doesn’t really matter; what matters is feeling like you’ve given the set your all, and left your soul on the training floor. (Remember, these are not normal “reps” in the traditional sense: The first will be by far the most difficult, “heavy” progression, and the last will look comparatively pathetic as fatigue sets in and you get weaker. It is basically equivalent to a set of back-to-back one-rep maxes, with each rep scaled to your maximum strength at that point in time.)

Aiming for as few reps as possible here is key. If we strive for more reps (thinking more is better), our bodies automatically encourage us to cheat and go lighter so that we can make it through the set without destroying ourselves. On the other hand, by making our goal to reach that point of fatigue as soon as possible, suddenly max-effort hard work becomes a good thing—we know we can end the set whenever we want to, and we’ve decided that sooner is preferable, so there is no point holding anything back. Effort it literally the only goal. And that’s a recipe for progress.

So that is my recommendation for volume: as little as possible to allow you to be satisfied with your effort. Remember, the only reason for including this work in the first place is progress, so as long as you are coming back stronger every session, there is no need to complicate volume any more than this. Test how little you can get away with, but push to make it heavier every time.

Note: For barbell work, the nearest equivalent I have used in the past is reverse pyramid training (as described above) for three sets of descending weight, allowing 4-6 reps, 6-8 reps, then 8-10 reps, pushed to the limit. This allows one or two proper max-effort reps per set, which equates almost to what we end up with using the bodyweight protocol. It takes much longer, is less efficient, doesn’t allow a fresh maximum-effort start and requires a bunch more expensive equipment, but if you’re set on using weights it’s a great start (and your best option in my opinion).

Summing Up

So what have we learned? Here are the important variables for designing training that is maximally effective in eliciting strength and muscle gain:

  1. Intensity should be as high as physically possible at all times during every rep. This is how you get stronger—by practicing being as strong as you can.
  2. Frequency should be as low as needed for full recovery on a given movement pattern—a week generally works well.
  3. Volume, in terms of ‘reps’, should be as low as possible to allow satisfaction with the work done (thus encouraging max-effort practice over all else; see point 1). If using bodyweight training, one set of 1-10 reps is a good staring guide.

Don’t let complicated programming or the myth of needing high volume/frequency hold you back from reaping the insane benefits strength training can give you. Start getting stronger with as little work as you can, and you’ll see for yourself just how simple insane progress can really be.