Here’s how you can get twice as strong in half the time of normal strength training regimes—and if you want, transform your body with just one weekly set each of six movements.

High Frequency Training Is Not Just Overrated… But Damaging

Going to the gym, or trying to go to the gym, five or six days a week, in my mind, is insanity. There’s this myth pervading the fitness industry that we need all this weekly stimulus to get results, with strength gain and muscle gain, particularly when it comes to the frequency of our workouts, thinking we need to be hitting each of our muscle groups all these times every single week to get results. But what I see ending up happening here all the time is that we just end up inconsistent because we set a routine that we can’t even stick to, and end up staying stuck and not reaching our goals anyway.

It’s absurd how frequently I see this happening, particularly when there is such an easy alternative available to us, which is to train once per week per movement. If you have six movement goals—which is all you need—that’s 40 minutes of training a week, including rest time, setup time, the whole lot. Unless you split that up over the week, which means, in the worst-case scenario, you’re training once for 40 minutes a week. Best case? Three 10-minute sessions per week, 30 minutes total. Either way, that is generally more than you need to stimulate all the muscle gain and strength gain that you could achieve with five or six hours in the gym that same week.

And again, that is assuming that you could actually consistently show up and do those five or six sessions every week long-term, consistently, for years on end—which, for most functioning normal human beings with lives, jobs, families, social lives, etc., is an absolutely unrealistic and, quite frankly, horrible goal to aim for.

How To Get Twice As Strong In Half The Time Of Regular Gym Routines

All right, so if the truth is we can get away with training once per week per movement, and that’s all we need, how does that look? And how is it that we’ve been told for so long that we need multiple gym sessions a week, a bunch of different exercises to build strength and muscle?

Movements, Not Muscles

The first thing we’ve got to realise is that the body grows, develops, and builds strength in relationship to movement patterns, not muscles. If we’re trying to target each of the muscles in our body and individually signal each of them to grow, we end up with a laundry list of different movements, an over-complicated routine, and it becomes impossible for us to channel our focus into any real progress in any particular direction. It’s much easier to think about movement patterns because there aren’t that many. I found that if you can hit the basic six of horizontal pushing and pulling, vertical pushing and pulling, squatting, and then knee flexion (reverse squatting), then you don’t really leave any gains on the table in terms of muscle mass, strength, or mobility if you train them properly through full range of motion and actually build strength through that range of motion.

And so, you can honestly forget about any of the individual muscles required within that. You can forget your anatomy textbook. If you can just select the right handful of basic movement patterns and focus on building those, then all the muscles, all the strength, all the functionality will come from that as a byproduct that you don’t have to worry about.

The Only Thing That Matters For Strength Gain

So, once you have your movement patterns, how do we then turn those into results—into strength gain, into muscle mass, into better functioning and looking bodies? That’s when this gets so amazingly simple, because all that has to happen, regardless of how we get there, regardless of how we program things, regardless of our frequency in the way, the volume that we use, the rep ranges, the rest times—none of those details actually matter so long as we can achieve one thing: progressing our strength over time in each of those movement patterns.

You’ve probably heard of progressive overload before. All that actually matters for us to build muscle and strength is achieving tangibly higher levels on those movement patterns—the ones we choose to train. And so, so long as we are continually pushing progress, getting stronger, increasing our maximum ability, then we know that what we’re doing is working. And the details, as I said, they no longer matter. They’re just a way of achieving that result. It’s very, very easy to get lost in the details of your program, to focus on having the perfect routine, basically majoring in all the minors of the exercise science surrounding what you’re doing, and never actually make any real progress. Never show up and push yourself to the limit to actually increase that strength, to grind, to make that progress in your maximum ability. Because I can tell you, it can be very simple. It can be once-a-week training. It can be just six movements, 40 minutes a week, but it will not happen without you going and making it happen with every bit of intent in your soul.

So, once we’ve selected our movement patterns, all that matters for progress is that we set really high-level, really challenging, really clear strength targets—one for each of those movement patterns—and that we just do everything in our power to ensure that we are taking one step towards those goals every time we show up and train. If we do that, and we do that for a long period of time, then we end up eventually at those goals. And the whole point of those goals is that achieving them equates to the strength, the muscle, the physique, and the mobility that we want to achieve.

Can Training Once Per Week Actually Get Us Stronger?

All this brings me back to our question of frequency and weekly time commitment. Put simply, once per week just works. If you show up and train at your maximum intensity, try to push a little bit heavier than you did the week before, doing that once per week for each of your movements is just ample.

The details of volume, recovery, and getting the balance right to optimise progress—I have simply found that if you can just stick to a regular routine, a regular frequency, show up once per week and give it your best effort, and then listen to your body to tell you how much to train, when to stop, when you’ve had enough, then your body just auto-regulates the rest. It learns; it’s got a week. And if you can just train for as long as it’s fun and then listen to your own intuition when your brain tells you, “This isn’t fun anymore, I can’t give it 100% anymore, I’d rather stop,” you’re going to learn to listen to that signal. Then, your body works with you to help you find the slot, build the perfect weekly rhythm, and a week gives it ample time to go and do the recovery it needs to do to build the muscle and grow stronger so that next time you come back and train that movement again, you can go heavier and push things to the next level.

What If We Want To Get Faster Results?

People often say, “You know, isn’t twice per week more optimal for muscle growth? Like, am I leaving gains on the table waiting so long between movements?” If you use those six movements I’ve talked about and split them up over the week, we end up training our upper body twice a week anyway, in slightly different ways. And so, even if you wanted to make that argument, I think my students and I can all attest to the fact that you find that optimal slot anyway as a result of such a simple process—just each movement once per week.

Splitting them up into antagonist pairs, doing a push and a pull one day, a push and a pull another day, legs another day, is in my experience the most enjoyable way to train, allows you to put the most energy into each of your movements, allows the best recovery; and so there’s no research I’ve seen that doesn’t line up with this being probably one of the most optimal routines you could design anyway.

The Bigger Picture: Sustainability

Regardless of that, the important thing is, as I said, that it works. And all that matters really is that you can keep coming back each week long term and going again so that you can actually reach that 10-year goal, that 20-year goal. Because this isn’t something we want to just do for a few months, burn out, and then stop. Most people I talk to want to be as fit as possible, as strong as possible, when they’re 60, 70, 80 years old. And so, it’s not just about the fact that to get the physique that you want, it’s going to take you years and you want to sustain it that long—we don’t want to ever stop doing this. And so, building something into your week that is easier to do than not do is honestly, whether it feels like it or not now, the highest priority for whatever time range of results you care about the most.

The Perfect Training Frequency For You

So, that’s taking get twice as strong in less than half the time of most training routines. You actually want to train once a week? You can. But you’ve got the opportunity to split things up over the week, you can get things done in even less time, potentially make faster progress, but most importantly find that this is an even easier process to do and to stick to.

If you want a bit more of a deep dive into which movements you should be doing and why, read this. If you want to learn how to make the most of that one set per week and gain strength as fast as possible, then read this.