Strength is a skill. 

You get really good at it, and the byproduct is muscle tissue.

To get really good at strength, you don’t actually need to do heaps of work every week. There is no law that says that, or any good evidence for it.

What I can confidently say you do need, based on everything I have experienced to date, is a lot of sleep cycles in between efforts of trying to be as strong as you can.

Iterations. Time spent recovering. 

But not that much time is needed actually training. Far less than what people have come to accept.

There are several problems that stem from overestimating amount and type of work we think is required to build muscle.

Problem: Thinking you need a lot of training volume every week to grow

Reason 1: Injury

Doing heaps of work every week (especially if it’s approaching high quality work of constant maximum intensity—the kind that gets results) is the fastest way to put yourself in hospital.

The body needs recovery. That is how you grow stronger. If you’re constantly slamming yourself with high stress efforts designed to elicit an adaptation without ample rest in between, you’re doing damage to your body without giving it the space to heal. That’s how you get overuse injuries and risk snapping shit up.

Reason 2: Resistance  

However, most people trying to train large amounts of volume will never do a set of high quality work in their lives in the first place; mainly due to the fact that your brain will naturally fight back against you trying to overuse it, usually quite effectively. This appears to you in the form of emotional resistance toward training. Maybe you feel dread when it comes to doing your 20^th set of the day, your last set of squats, or the entire workout itself.

There’s a reason gruelling long workouts are hard to face. Your brain’s aware of its work capacity limits and will do what it can to avoid getting stretched too thin—it’s trying to help you. It’s also aware of the diminishing returns on your efforts, which brings us to…

Reason 3: Time

Obviously, doing multiple sets, trying to push through this resistance and get a large volume of work done, takes time. This is valuable time of your life, hours spent every week working hard that you could be consistently channeling into any other pursuit—work, your relationships, other skills you want to learn, or rest.

Every minute counts when compounded over the 100s of weeks that you’re going to need to be training for to gain significant amounts of muscle. You only have one life, and you need to be very selective about how you spend your time. The fact I’ve gotten the best results of my life training for less than 40 minutes a week makes me all the more sad when I look at others who still think they’re benefiting from the other 3-4 hours a week they’re spending at the gym (especially when they’re achieving very little from it in terms of actual progress toward their strength and physique goals, if they have them).

Problem: Thinking you need to be constantly working out to keep your muscle tissue once you’ve got it.

Reason: Seeing it as not worth doing in the first place

A flow-on issue from thinking that muscle requires all this constant work to gain, is believing that it will magically disappear if you suddenly stop going to the gym 6 days a week. My jaw drops when I hear this sort of thinking throwing people off the idea of trying to gain muscle the first place. Meanwhile my students and I are gaining muscle at intermediate/advanced levels (not just maintaining) on less than half an hour a week, often in a single session.

This brings me to a crucial point to remember with any sort of goal you want to achieve:

The process that gets you to your goal needs to be enjoyable and sustainable indefinitely. 

This is because 

a) achieving the goal always takes longer than you think, and

b) there’s never really an end point where you’ve reached the goal and you’re done. You’re going to have to (and want to) keep doing the thing long after you’ve achieved your original goal.

The good news is, for muscle gain, half an hour a week is ample training time to make those gains in the first place—meaning keeping your muscles takes almost no time at all. More on this below. 

Problem: Thinking you need to isolate muscles to grow them

Reason: Utter confusion

Muscle growth happens as a result of getting strong on basic movement patterns (compound movements). The human body is designed to work in unison, to grow and adapt as a unit. You don’t have to try to engineer it yourself. Building up the basic couple of movements patterns will sort all your body’s muscles, in sync, in balance. As evolution designed it.

Trying to grow by working muscles in isolation is not only completely missing the point, it distracts you from your crucial goal of improving your strength on the basics, which is hard enough as it is without splintering your focus across a bunch of other movements. And, like with volume, trying to do more movements in order to isolate muscles takes more time, increases your risk of injury, and (for good reason) invites more emotional resistance. Screw that.

Problem: Thinking you need to “bulk” to build muscle

Reason 1: Gaining excessive fat for no reason 

Your body is incredibly smart (thanks millions of years of evolution). 

When it receives the signal that it needs to get stronger, it will use available resources to build muscle tissue. If there isn’t enough, it’s gong to encourage you to do something about that, i.e., ramp up your appetite. 

If you hit a protein target, and listen to your appetite (don’t restrict yourself, eat as much as you need), you will be providing your body everything it needs to do its thing, and it will sort the rest out. There’s no need to force-feed yourself like you’re a sumo wrestler.

Reason 2: Not trying to gain muscle for fear of fat gain

Doing the above, you’re not going to need to gain a bunch of fat. It’s not necessary for muscle growth at all. 

What if you want to actively lose body fat?

In that case (which inevitably comes around periodically for everyone), you spend a distinct period of time (4-12 weeks) in a calorie deficit, lose the fat you want to lose, and then get back straight back into fuelling your appetite.

How to pack on muscle in minutes (permanently)

The solution to all of the above boils down to this:

Realise that strength is a skill, and that to build muscle you just have to get better at that skill.

Step 1. Choose a handful of basic strength goals – One per plane of motion

If in doubt, aim to build up to these 5 movements:

• Straddle planche pushup
• Front lever row
• Handstand pushup
• One-arm chinup
• Single leg squat loaded @ 75% bodyweight

Get strong enough on the movement patterns required to do these skills and your muscle mass will be evenly distributed in natural proportions that look absolutely fantastic (no isolation work required). There’s no need to worry about imbalances or trying to isolate certain muscles that you want to grow. The way to make sure they grow is by getting stronger. Really fucking strong. On those basic planes of motion.

Basically, don’t complain about having a small chest until you’re doing straddle planche pushups; don’t complain about having small biceps until you’re doing a one-arm chinup; and don’t complain about having small quads until you’re single leg squatting 75% of your bodyweight. If the mass isn’t there yet, get back to work until you can perform those movements. I’d like to see anyone complain about their level of muscle mass once they reach those strength goals. It simply won’t be an issue. 

Step 2. Train each of those movement patterns intensely, once per week

Building up to these strength goals can be done with just one brief effort per week each (no crazy volume required). I simply do one continual set of maximum effort work, against as much resistance as I can handle (and more than I can resist on the negative (lowering) portions, forcing myself down), I go until it’s no longer fun, then I stop. For me this usually takes about 1-4 reps—a couple of minutes per movement. 

For me and my students, working this little has meant:

• No injury

• Workouts that are fun and easy (satisfaction comes form going harder, not longer, which is what leads to progress)

• A total training time of under 40 minutes a week (including setup and rest time)

What’s not to like about that routine? You can do more if you want to. But this works, as well as any other higher volume approach I’ve tested. 

I know what I’m going to stick to.

Step 3. When you need to take time off, treat it as extra recovery

Contrary to what most gym-goers believe, that skill of strength that you build doing this training won’t just fade as soon as you stop using it. And it will come back quickly after a long period of non-use, once it’s been built once. You just need to keep coming back and keep trying, long term. Don’t be precious about sticking unfailingly to some perfect routine (which is completely arbitrary anyway, even if an expert coach designed it). Instead, have a system that’s anti-fragile (missing sessions = more recovery = more gains and better performance next training session) and you will win the long-term gain without trying (which is the only game there is).

You can go away on holidays and not worry about your training. When you’re back to routine, just keep working at it, and you’ll be fine. Muscle gain is such a long game. Don’t get so caught in the short term that you miss the big picture. It takes years to grow significant amounts of muscle mass. But it only takes minutes each week to spur this growth. That’s not hard to maintain long-term if you keep your focus to just that. 

Step 4. Support that training with enough food to feel good (just listen to your appetite)

Training will drive all desired changes in muscle mass, without the need to worry about the perfect diet. There’s no point trying to gain a heap of weight through what you eat. It’s like trying to make your car go faster by overfilling it with petrol. 

To give yourself ample building blocks for growth just aim to hit 1.8g per kg bodyweight of protein a day, and let your appetite do the rest (in terms of getting in sufficient calories). If you’ve just come off a deficit and want a target to aim for, you can shoot for a 100-300 calorie daily surplus, which the rough ranges that the body can use for muscle growth. Then dial that in depending on hunger, rate of weight gain, and how you’re feeling.

Strength is a skill. If you want big muscles, don’t overcomplicate your journey there: just get very good at that skill by practicing it with intent, recovering fully, and repeating that cycle enough times that you get to where you want to be.